The Kingston Trio is still playing nearly 70 years after the band’s formation. In its heyday, the band was so influential and commercially successful that the music is often associated with an entire era. Both achingly nostalgic and timeless, the group still performs to this day (albeit with different members), and is coming to Stissing Center on Nov. 22.
Known for dulcet vocal harmonies, smoothly blended and tinged with melancholy, The Kingston Trio is going back to their roots. It use stripped-down yet refined instrumentation — guitar, banjo, light percussion, and upright bass — providing a rhythmic backbone as the members huddle around a single microphone, singing with a storyteller’s flair, weaving in drama, humor, and history.
The original trio of Dave Guard, Bob Shane, and Nick Reynolds started out in California, playing the Bay Area nightclub circuit in 1957. By 1962, thanks to hits such as “Tom Dooley” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” it made up roughly 15 percent of Capitol Records’ total sales. The group was so prominent that it is often credited with sparking the folk revival of the 1960s. Artists from Buffalo Springfield to Fleetwood Mac have drawn a direct line to the trio in the development of their own style.
But despite often being labeled as such, The Kingston Trio’s original members never thought of themselves as strictly a folk group.
“Americana, that’s the best term for it,” said Buddy Woodward, who joined The Kingston Trio in 2022 and plays tenor guitar, banjo, and congas. “They did country and western and show tunes, they did songs from New Zealand, they did songs from France, they did foreign language songs, they did all kinds of stuff.”
None of the original members is living, but The Kingston Trio lives on. Over nearly seven decades, a rotating roster of musicians has carried the torch, evolving the trio’s sound through South Seas rhythms, country twang, and touches of electrification, all while maintaining the group’s Americana DNA. This iteration has returned to the 1962 version of the band, replete with short-sleeved striped shirts (tucked in) and a lone microphone.
For current members Mike Marvin, Tim Gorelangton, and Buddy Woodward, (all with deep ties to the original members through friendship and collaboration), playing in The Kingston Trio is as much about preserving a legacy as it is of putting on a good show. “Before I go on stage, I usually take a minute and I look at myself in the mirror,” said Woodward. “I remind myself, they’re not here to see you, they’re here to see The Kingston Trio.”
At its formation, the group was more aligned with Calypso than with folk, but as the trio gained popularity, the music industry needed a convenient box to put it in. “Tom Dooley” won the 1959 Grammy for Best Country & Western Performance without fitting neatly into that genre. The next year the Grammys had added a folk category, and the group’s album “The Kingston Trio at Large” won that, too.
“Tom Dooley,” an old folk ballad about Confederate veteran Tom Dula, who murdered his lover Laura Foster and was hanged in 1868, became the group’s signature song. The Kingston Trio didn’t write it, but its version — gruesome, somber in tone, but carried by a laid-back, beachy strumming pattern — rose to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 1959.
“The idea that three guys and an upright bass player playing two- or three-chord murder ballads were going to set the world on fire — nobody would have even joked about that,” said Woodward.
Another hit, “M.T.A,” — which tells the fictional tale of a man named Charlie forever stuck on the Boston subway system — is uptempo, and rumbles with jangling guitars and busy banjo rhythms. The Kingston Trio’s popularization of the 1948 folk song became so iconic that Boston named its subway pass the CharlieCard in tribute.
Original members Guard and Shane grew up in Hawaii, and early recordings like “Run Joe,” from their days as Dave Guard and the Calypsonians, showcase their slack-key guitar wizardry and breezy island rhythms.
While audience members often recall The Kingston Trio’s songs from their youth, the group is also spawning young fans. “We were in Billings, Mont., about five years ago,” Woodward said. “A grandmother brought her grandson under duress to the show. He sat in the front row with his arms folded. Five years later, we show back up in Billings, and there’s the kid. He’d bought a Martin D-28 [guitar], and he’d started his own group, learning traditional songs and harmonies.”
At Stissing Center, audiences will see The Kingston Trio, in its current state, perform the group’s classic hits, arranged in what Woodward calls an “emotional arc,” full of infectious storytelling, lilting rhythms, heartbreaking ballads, and a permeating playfulness. “That’s really the greatest legacy of the Kingston Trio,” said Woodward. “Inspiring people to pick up their own instruments and sing.”
The Kingston Trio will perform at 7 p.m. on Nov. 22 at Stissing Center. Tickets start at $45. Click here for more info.