Art Thieme says it. He has a good handle on this because he was there, he's been doing folk music all his life, and knows what he's talking about.

Sorry to say it, Anonny Mouse, but you seem to have fallen into the same short-sighted, misleading prejudice that has Martin Gibson trapped in his own delusional universe. You can both quote statistics till hell freezes over, but if it hadn't been for all that preceded the Kingston Trio's first album, you and Martin wouldn't have any statistics to quote, because there would have been no such album.

Someone said earlier that a lot of the gung-ho "the Kingston Trio invented folk music" mythology is because the believers in this myth imprinted on the KT the same way baby ducks fresh out of the shell imprint on the first thing they see, such as the old, spavined barnyard dog, and follow the old dog around, convinced that it's its mother.

I've run into this before and have argued all these arguments before. The advocates of canonizing the Kingston Trio as the patron saints of ALL folk singers act like their religion is being called into question whenever someone doesn't share their view of history. To make blunt statements like that is simplistic and tends to cut off any investigation of what REALLY happened. Very political, in fact. "Let's not bother to investigate this because we might find out that we're wrong."

In his post of 11 Dec 05 - 02:49 PM, Don Firth recommends a couple of very good books that can give you a good, detailed rundown on what the world was really like as far as folk music was concerned. "When We Were Good: The Folk Revival" by Robert Cantwell and "Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots" by Benjamin Filene. Both of these are good. I would also recommend reading "Follow the Music" by Jac Holzman (head of Elektra Records) and Gavan Daws, and "Postively 4th Street" by David Hajdu.

If you're REALLY interesting in where the folk revival came from rather than simply wanting to maintaining a misconception, it would be to your advantage to do some reading.

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