I think that what the Deli Lama (!!???) says about pinning the definition of "influential" down a bit tighter, as in 'who influenced whom?" points out that the question leads to a sort of infinite regression. Each step along the way influences the next step, and that next step would not have happened had it not been for the one preceding it.

It is true that the Kingston Trio's first album was the first recording of folk songs that vast numbers of people bought like a pop-music record, which, at the time, it actually was (a sort of cross-over album), and it did inspire a lot of kids to take up guitars and banjos. No doubt about that. But once the popular phase of the Kingston Trio was eclipsed by the Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion, their influence pretty much died out except for a hard-core group of fans.

I don't want to take anything away from the Kingston Trio that they deserve, but essentially their music was derivative. They didn't really add anything that hadn't been done before by others. There were the Weavers, the Gateway Singers, and the Almanac Singers before them, not to mention a whole raft of solo singers such as Burl Ives, Cynthia Gooding, Josh White, Frank Warner, and many others.

A lot of older singers (coffeehouse variety and others) who learned their songs from the records of Burl Ives, Ed McCurdy, Jean Ritchie, Richard Dyer-Bennet, and others, and from books by Carl Sandburg and the Lomaxes, and who were singing them long before the Kingston Trio came along, found that it was a royal pain in the ass when they would get a request for a song, sing it, and then have the person making the request bitch at them because they didn't singing it the way the Kingston Trio did it. I speak from experience, because it happened to me fairly often. Tends to be a bit off-pissing. I mean, who made the Kingston Trio the authority on how a song should be done? Not their fault, of course, but there it was! The Kingston Trio wasn't the problem, it was some of their gung-ho fans.

It's amazing how bent out of shape some folks can get when others don't fully share their enthusiasm (sometimes bordering on worship) of the Kingston Trio. It's as if someone has insulted their mother or something!

The Kingston Trio was damned good. But let's try to keep things in perspective.

Don Firth