Post by erik on Aug 7, 2021 17:16:50 GMT -5
A murder ballad involving a love triangle in post-Civil War North Carolina is in this week's Pop Music Hits Spotlight, as it helped kick off the folk music movement/scare that would influence much of American popular music beginning in 1958.
TOM DOOLEY (The Kingston Trio; Capitol; 1958)—With rock and roll somewhat in eclipse (several of its big stars were out of action for somewhat nefarious regions, and its biggest, Elvis, was in the Army), urban folk music began filling the void at the end of the 1950’s, resulting in what came to be known as the folk music revival (or “scare”). Urban and suburban kids turned off by the teen idols who intended to fill Elvis’ shoes (rather ridiculously) instead got turned on to Beat poetry, and then, through utilizing acoustic guitars, began exploring the vast array of folk music of the previous hundred years. Woody Guthrie and his friend Pete Seeger were unquestionably the big catalysts for this; but it was a San Francisco-based male trio, the Kingston Trio, that bought the folk music revival its first massive hit in the form of a North Carolina-based “murder ballad” called “Tom Dooley”. The trio, consisting of Bob Shane, Nick Reynolds, and Dave Guard, adapted this song, based on the 1866 murder in Wilkes County, North Carolina of a young girl named Laura Foster by one Tom Dula (pronounced “Dooley” by the locals) and the apprehension of Dula by a man named Grayson, who was either Foster’s intended lover or a local lawman. Dula was convicted and eventually hanged for the murder, in which Foster was savagely stabbed with a knife. Capitol Records, which had signed the trio in 1957, was very reluctant to release the track, until Paul Colburn and Bill Terry, a pair of disc jockeys at KLUB in Salt Lake City, Utah, played it and found a huge demand for it. Much to the label’s, and the trio’s, shock, “Tom Dooley” roared up to #1 on the Hot 100 in November 1958, thus kicking off the folk revival, which would survive its “electrification” by Bob Dylan in 1965, and influence an endless amount of artists in and out of folk music. The Kingston Trio themselves continued to have big hits (Guard would be replaced by the Cumberland Three’s John Stewart in 1962) with such folk music hits as “Tijuana Jail”, “MTA”, Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” and “Greenback Dollar” (written by Hoyt Axton), before they dispersed in 1967.
TOM DOOLEY (The Kingston Trio; Capitol; 1958)—With rock and roll somewhat in eclipse (several of its big stars were out of action for somewhat nefarious regions, and its biggest, Elvis, was in the Army), urban folk music began filling the void at the end of the 1950’s, resulting in what came to be known as the folk music revival (or “scare”). Urban and suburban kids turned off by the teen idols who intended to fill Elvis’ shoes (rather ridiculously) instead got turned on to Beat poetry, and then, through utilizing acoustic guitars, began exploring the vast array of folk music of the previous hundred years. Woody Guthrie and his friend Pete Seeger were unquestionably the big catalysts for this; but it was a San Francisco-based male trio, the Kingston Trio, that bought the folk music revival its first massive hit in the form of a North Carolina-based “murder ballad” called “Tom Dooley”. The trio, consisting of Bob Shane, Nick Reynolds, and Dave Guard, adapted this song, based on the 1866 murder in Wilkes County, North Carolina of a young girl named Laura Foster by one Tom Dula (pronounced “Dooley” by the locals) and the apprehension of Dula by a man named Grayson, who was either Foster’s intended lover or a local lawman. Dula was convicted and eventually hanged for the murder, in which Foster was savagely stabbed with a knife. Capitol Records, which had signed the trio in 1957, was very reluctant to release the track, until Paul Colburn and Bill Terry, a pair of disc jockeys at KLUB in Salt Lake City, Utah, played it and found a huge demand for it. Much to the label’s, and the trio’s, shock, “Tom Dooley” roared up to #1 on the Hot 100 in November 1958, thus kicking off the folk revival, which would survive its “electrification” by Bob Dylan in 1965, and influence an endless amount of artists in and out of folk music. The Kingston Trio themselves continued to have big hits (Guard would be replaced by the Cumberland Three’s John Stewart in 1962) with such folk music hits as “Tijuana Jail”, “MTA”, Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” and “Greenback Dollar” (written by Hoyt Axton), before they dispersed in 1967.