O Gibbous One, I'm afraid your analogy of the Interstate highway doesn't work. Where did all those cars on your Interstate come from in the first place? They didn't just suddenly pop into existence, already on the Interstate, from out of nowhere.

On-ramps, my boy, on-ramps. All those people that YOU never heard of, that you're discounting as not having any influence. Just because they were not YOUR particular influence doesn't mean that they were not a big influence on a lot of other people. Including, I might point out, the Kingston Trio.

Ask yourself, who influenced the Kingston Trio? Why did they choose to do folk music? Obviously, THEY had been influenced themselves by the people that you're trying to claim had little or no influence.

A breeze, a current, a wind, all going in the same way, each one not enough to do it all by itself, but the accumulated effect gradually created the wave I've been talking about. That wave, building up over a period of time, that the Kingston Trio surfed to fame on is a better description of what really happened.

There can be a first "best seller" album, but that is not necessarily what had the strongest influence on the trend as a whole. I think there was no "most influential album." The influence, a cumulative effect, was already there by the time the Kingston Trio's first album came along. Their album created a blip, but in the long run, not much more than that. The folk revival was already under weigh. What they created was "The Great Folk Scare," which was not the same thing.

And Bill, you're right about Pete Seeger. Even though the Weavers had been blackballed and remained essentially inactive until the "Weavers at Carnegie Hall" album, Pete Seeger continued to do concerts at colleges all over the country, sponsored, not by the colleges themselves, but by various student groups (I know, because I know people who were involved in this). Sometimes he didn't get paid very much, but he was out and around doing concerts anyway, "below the radar." During the early and mid '50s, a lot of college students got turned on to folk music in small auditoriums in student organization houses, church basements, a LOT of Quaker meeting houses, and various other venues in and around colleges. This is attested to by enough increasing demand—in the mid '50's—for long-necked banjos like the one Seeger MADE for himself, for Vega to begin making a "Seeger Model" banjo. Bob Gibson, who was performing at the Gate of Horn in Chicago, got his "Seeger Model" (and I bought mine on his recommendation) before the Kingston Trio even formed. By the time Dave Guard bought his "Seeger Model" banjo, there were quite a few of them out and around.

Pete Seeger justly earned his title of "Pied Piper of Folk Music." BUT, although he wielded a powerful influence as an individual, it would be foolish to say that he was THE most influential person in the folk revival. That would be to ignore his father, Charles, and Alan Lomax, who go Pete interested in folk music in the first place, when he went to work for Lomax in the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Music. And then there were all those who went before them: Bishop Percy, Sir Walter Scott, F. J. Child, Cecil Sharp, all those who collected and compiled this material, without whom city kids like the Kingston Trio wouldn't have much folk music to sing.

I suppose that mentioning these people makes me some kind of "purist."

Sorry about that! (But not very.)

The Deli Lama