Interesting to find this thread still alive ten years into it.

Seems to me, as implied above, that an expressed distaste for the Kingston Trio after admitting to a brief period of liking them until one finds the "real" stuff is a common way to damn them with faint praise. Even Time Magazine's Richard Corliss, in a 2003 article retrospective on pop folk music, asserts that the KT's importance is historical, though he grudgingly admits that they were "pretty good."

In fact - they were easily the largest record-selling group in U.S. pop music history prior to the Beatles. They essentially created (with Harry Belafonte) the public's appetite for for full-length record albums rather than singles. And their success - selling $25 million in records between 1958-1960 (more than $180 million today) is what sent record companies scrambling to find "folk" artists. Virtually everyone who played an acoustic instrument - including Doc Watson, Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul and Mary (assembled by Warner Bros. records especially to be that company's KT) - benefited financially from that attention. And the honest ones, like Watson, were explicit in acknowledging that.

The iconization of the Weavers is a romantic re-interpretation of history. They were the first pop-folk commercial group, and their early recordings - the million-selling ones of 1950 - carefully avoided any political content, as well as being laden with saccharine orchestrations and background singers. "The Weavers At Carnegie Hall" on tiny Vanguard is a great recording - but it is no more authentic than the early KT albums, and it sold in the thousands where their Decca singles sold in the millions. ITS importance - the reunion of a great group following the Red Scare - is more historical than anything else. Those professionally arranged and harmonized versions of folk songs have no more "authenticity" compared to the field recordings from which they were often adapted than did the KT's.

I remember Van Ronk acidly took the KT to task for their crewcuts - but had nothing to say about the Weavers tuxes and evening gown at that Carnegie concert.

It would be sad indeed if all one knew of folk music was the Kingston Trio - who, by the way, always denied that they were "folk music" in any way. My own interest in folk music started with Win Stracke and Burl Ives and was stoked by the KT. It continued to the Weavers and traditional singers and modern interpreters and a lot of acoustic and world music in general.

But none of that necessitated disliking the KT. I have a hard time swallowing the idea that a bunch of New Yorkers trying to imitate either black blues singers a la Van Ronk or old-timey Appalachian performers a la the NLCR are any more authentic than three college boys playing fast and loose with both the music and copyrights - exactly as their idols the Weavers did. Or doesn't anyone else remember who "Paul Campbell" was?

I wrote the Wikipedia article on the KT. It is more about the history than the music, but I'd direct attention to the "Folk music label" and "Influence" sections for some perspective on what the KT was and was not.

The Kingston Trio In Wikipedia

And from that "influence section - Joan Baez from 1987:

"Traveling across the country with my mother and sisters, we heard the commercial songs of the budding folk boom for the first time, the Kingston Trio's 'Tom Dooley' and 'Scotch and Soda.' Before I turned into a snob and learned to look down upon all commercial folk music as bastardized and unholy, I loved the Kingston Trio. When I became one of the leading practitioners of 'pure folk,' I still loved them..."