I have a little bit to add, "Gateway Singers At the Hungry i" is Decca DL 8671. Maybe somebody can find a date knowing the album #. My copy is pathetic, almost unlistenable. I found it in the 1970's on a trash pile and I have no dust jacket. tha album has the Sigmund Freud song (also done by the Chad Mitchell Trio on the Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall album). Othe well known songs includ, Rueben James, Oleanna, This Little Light of MIne, the Fox, Roving Gambler, Erie Canal and a few more. A second LP of mine is "The Gateway Singers On The Lot" that one is Warner Brothers W 1295 and has a 1959 date on it. On the back of the dust jacket in a "May We Suggest: section" is listed "Gateway Singers, Decca 8671". So the other album predates this one and is 1959 or earlier. The "ON the Lot" album lists the performers as Elmerlee Thomas ( a woman who had at least one solo album), Jerry Walter (more below), Ernie Sheldon (around folk music for a long time, solo albums, replaced Glenn Yarbrough in Limeliters et al) and Marc Richards (I don't think the same one Clinton pardoned). Walter is holding the banjo on the cover photo. Songs on that album are: I won't be Worried Long, Gypsy-O, Ariran (Korean), Hurrican, Come All Ye Fair & Tender Maidens, East Virginia, Don't you LIe Daddy-O (variation of Sail Away Ladies), Dehlia's Blues, The MTA (yes that one), Come Along Charlie, Pretty Saro, Keep A-Movin'.

And one more thing is an album called "The Gateway Trio" (Capitol T 2184). This album followed "The Mad MAd MAd Gateway Trio" which puts it at later than 1961, actually a few years later because the inside sleeve has advertising for 3 Beatles albums and 2 Beach Boys albums. The Gateway Trio are Jerry Walter, Betty Mann, and Milt Chapman. The pargraph about Walter says: "Jerry Walter, an ex-radio Jack Armstrong, and all-Chicagoan boy, soap opera'd his way to audience recognition....Having accumulated such basics as a family, guitar and five-string banjo, glib tongue, and a Private's degree from Uncle Sam's army, Jerry finally put his formal training from the American and San Francisco conservatories of music to work in 1956, when he organized the folk-centered Gateway Singers. When by 1961 the "Singers" were professionally disbanded, Walter embarked on the project that was to catapult him into entertainment stardom with his crowning accomplishment - the formation of the Gateway Trio"

Conclusions - Gateway Singers (1956)were a year or more ahead of Kingstons (1957). Don, the banjo player you chatted with was probably Jerry Walter, the group's organizer. Jerry's "stardom" was apparently not long-lived.

Unanswered question - did the Gateway MTA preceed or follow the Kinston MTA?

rich r