Here's a 1988 Detroit Free Press story aobut the Limeliters. IT addresses some of the issues in this thread.


At the height of the folk music boom in the early '60s, there were two
types of fans -- the masses who watched "Hootenanny" on TV and the folk purists who watched but were ashamed to admit it.

That means nearly everyone saw the Limeliters. Nearly everyone enjoyed the trio, too, but some were ashamed to admit it.

"Yes, we were tarred with the brush of folk music as saleable," Limeliter Alex Hassilev said in a phone interview from Los Angeles. "We certainly never consciously set out to pop-ify anything. We just sang folk songs the way we wanted to sing them."
The Limeliters -- originals Hassilev, who'll turn 56 on July 11, and Lou Gottlieb, 64, and relatively new addition Red Grammer, who's about 35, Hassilev says -- are alive, well, recording and performing.
And having been around, on and off, since 1959, a funny thing has
happened to the Limeliters: They've gained a measure of espectability in the folk community.
As Hassilev points out, "Back in the '60s we never did any folk
festivals; nobody ever asked us." This year they finally did one -- the well-regarded Kerrville (Tex.) Folk Festival. "They loved us," said Hassilev. "We loved it."
After Yarbrough left in 1963 to embark on a solo career, the group
disbanded. In 1973 they reunited with Yarbrough and did reunion concerts for four months a year until 1977. "From 1977 to 1980 we didn't work," Hassilev said.
Then they discovered tenor and songwriter Grammer "and decided he was so good it drew us out retirement."
Nowadays they're on the road 15 to 18 weeks a year. "We don't want to work any harder than that."
The cu rent Limeliters repertoire is a mixture of old and new, Hassilev said. "Needless to say, when you go back as far as we do, the audience won't let us forget a lot of the old ones, 'Have Some Madeira, M'Dear,' 'There's a Meetin' Here Tonight.' . . . We also do a variety of folk or folk-like songs that are more contemporary."
There are, says Hassilev, "only two places for an act that's been around as long as ours to go -- you either become living legends or you get out of the business. Have we become living legends? To a slight extent, but not as much as I would like it to be.
"I think there's somewhat more respect for what we do. The folk community always looked askance at the Limeliters. I never quite understood that. In my opinion the Limeliters were always a lot more straightforward than sometimes the critics felt we were.
"We were interested in making good music. We still are."