Sunday, March 18, 2018

Hanging Around For a Long Time

Song 399: This week on the playlist you can hear Tom Dooley by The Kingston Trio, which is a traditional song arranged by Dave Guard on this hit. You can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. I actually first heard this single in my 5th grade classroom, as we were learning and doing some folk songs, probably around this time of year, back in 1962. In that era, it didn't  impress me, and I felt the lyrics didn't  tell the story very well. Over the next couple of years I would hear some other folk music that I liked, but when the Beatles and their fellow British invaders rocked my world in the winter of 1964, my interest in folk music waned, and would not rekindle itself until the turn of the 1970s, when my circle at Northwestern U. widened my listening experience with their LP collections. Still, during that stretch, music fans in my sphere tended to see the Kingston Trio as commercializers of folk music, and therefore generally unworthy of serious consideration. Fast forward to the middle of the 1980s, when flea markets became a good place to buy used albums, and I started to expand my collection, with a bunch of Kingston Trio 33s among the many added to the stash. I soon found that the more of them I got, the more I liked what I heard, including this cut, which sounded a lot better to me than it had a couple of decades earlier. At a certain point, maybe 6 months into my new-found appreciation for the KT, I happened to mention them to my good friend and fellow singer-songwriter Jeff Larson, and I discovered that he had begun collecting their records around the same time I had, developing a similar admiration for them in the process. Whether or not the real life Mr. Dooley died a long time ago by Hangin' from a white oak tree, the record about him still sounds pretty good to me almost 6 decades after 3 guys in a small room put it down on tape.

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