[purchase Here We Go]
An article in an old (not so old that it is history yet) NewYorker I recently read an article that indicates that I wasn't off the mark in pegging the Kingston Trio as one of the seminal forces that brought rock to the world ( but that is history). Among the piece's other observations, the article posits that - along with the 45RPM, the 33 1/3RPM and transistors radios, it was record players cheap enough that kids could have their own and be freed from the constraints of listening to music in the presence of -and on the hi-fi stereos of- their parents that helped bring about the rock explosion.
The songs of the The Kingston Trio's 1960 album (Here We Go Again) in which the concerns of the world appeared to be "eating Goober peas", "hauling away" at the oars of a boat on a stormy sea, or yodeling as you climb the Matterhorn, make their world appear rather light and removed from our current state of affairs. Much like Simon and Garfunkel, or Bob Dylan - they were among those that bridged folk and pop and lead to a "beat-ier" kind of music that lead to the Beat-les. Rock music didn't become mainstream until the Kingston trio and Simon & Garfunkel & Bob Dylan (and the Beatles) cut a path from folk music to rock music.
The NewYorker article mentions that teens getting their own recordplayers partially liberated them from parental oversight, but - for me - it was my parents who brought home the Kingston Trio's 1959 album "Here We Go Again". We listened again and again and now the Kingston Trio is relegated to ... history. My siblings and I memorized the entire album and can still recite the whole thing word for word more than 50 years later. If my folks had known that it was going to lead to the psychedelic music of the 60s that we soon were enjoying, I wonder if they wouldn't have left the album on the store shelves.
More history from Here We Go Again: (As if the Civil War itself isn't history enough in itself)
