Yes, I went the same road as many of you---liked the Trio until I learned better. I'd grown up listening to and loving the WLS Barn Dance radio show in Chicago through the '40s and '50s. It became clear to me when I heard Bob Atcher really put his mind to real cowboy songs instead of doing just cowboy material that something real and roots-based ---- from another time and place was happening. When the Trio hit big, I listened and enjoyed. They were entertainers. As Sandy Paton said on the MEETING HOUSE radio show in Chicago about 1959 or 60 on WSBC-FM, to host Phil Green, "What the Kingston Trio does bloody well is entertain. But that's not what folksinging is all about." Then and there I decided he was right/correct. I went back to the roots for inspiration, found out that folksingers are quite lucky in that we could not only go from here to there like any truck driver. No, we could also go back and forth through time at a moments notice and, by the way, travel from California to the New York island geographically and then meet the folks there all in the songs. If, like me, you got lucky you might spend the next 40 years finding the places in the songs and the people who had learned the music from the old ones who had actually been there with Buffalo Bill and Paul Bunyan and Belle Starr and John Henry and Mother Jones. These folks knew Joe Hill---were there at the Haymarket and at Ludlow---travelled the "Crooked Trail To Holbrook" and recognized the "Simple Gifts" they were lucky enough to be experiencing.

If you wet your your thirst with the K.T. that was well and good. --- But I do hope you went deeper and did your own digging for artifacts. For me, it has been a glorious treasure hunt !!!

Art Thieme