The Kingston Trio and the Red Scare

The death of Nick Reynolds, one of the Kingston Trio, on October 1 at age 75, provoked fond memories of one era and painful reminders of another.

The fond memories are of the folk music revival that began in the late 1950s with the clean-cut, college-boy Kingston Trio and within a few years was closely linked to crusades for justice. The painful ones come from remembering that the period was accompanied by the cold war and the McCarthy era, when what you sang-- as much as what you said--could get you in trouble.

Reynolds, Bob Shane and Dave Guard formed the Kingston Trio in 1957, originally as calypso group. The next year, their first hit, a rendition of the traditional folk song "Tom Dooley," earned a gold record and a Grammy. Thirteen of the group's albums, which included such hit songs as "A Worried Man" and "Tijuana Jail," reached the Top Ten. In 1959 alone, they had four albums at the same time among the ten top-selling albums.

Purists often derided the Kingston Trio for watering down folk songs in order to make them commercially popular and for remaining on the political sidelines during the protest movements of the 1960s. But the group deserves credit for helping to launch the folk boom that brought recognition to older folkies and radicals like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and for paving the way for newcomers like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs, who were well-known for their progressive political views and topical songs. By the time these younger folk singers arrived on the scene, the political climate had changed enough to provide a wide audience for protest music.

Reynolds was candid about the difficult position that the Kingston Trio took to navigate their way through those interlocking eras. In an interview last year, he told us that the members of his group were "big fans of the Weavers," the folk group with Pete Seeger that had a number-one hit in 1950 with "Goodnight Irene" but were blacklisted for their left-wing sympathies and forced to break up in 1952.

Reynolds, who was friends with Weaver member Fred Hellerman, acknowledged that what happened to the Weavers caused the Kingston Trio to choose a different course.

"We decided that if we wanted to have our songs played on the airwaves, we'd better stay in the middle of the road politically," he explained. "We'd just got out of school. We didn't want to get blacklisted." Asked if the Weavers had warned the trio to avoid controversy, he replied: "They didn't have to."

Even after they'd made it big, the group never aligned itself with protest causes, said Reynolds, who described himself as a "very liberal Democrat." Onstage, "the most we ever did was give a plug for John Kennedy" during his 1960 campaign against Richard Nixon.

Reynolds recalled that despite their personal support for the civil rights movement, the Kingston Trio didn't performed songs like "We Shall Overcome" at their concerts.

Reynolds also admitted that the Kingston Trio even resorted to changing the lyrics of one of their biggest hits in order to avoid controversy. It happened when they recorded "M.T.A.," the ballad about a man named Charlie doomed to "ride forever 'neath the streets of Boston" for want of a nickel to pay the fare to get off. (Watch the YouTube video of the Trio performing the "M.T.A." song)

The lyrics to "M.T.A." had been written as a campaign song for Walter A. O'Brien Jr., the Progressive Party candidate for mayor of Boston in 1949. (The tune was taken from "The Ship That Never Returned" by Henry Clay Work, written in 1865, and later transformed into "The Wreck of the Old 97" by Vernon Dalhart in 1924, then "The Train that Never Returned" by the radical Almanac Singers in 1941.)

An admitted long shot, O'Brien recruited Bess Lomax Hawes, daughter of folk song collector John Lomax, and Jackie Steiner to write the song for him. Although the story told in the song is humorous, it was meant to dramatize O'Brien's call for a rollback of the subway fare increase in Boston and protest the recent bailout of the privately owned Boston Elevated Railway Company by the Massachusetts legislature through creation of the publicly owned Massachusetts Transit Authority (MTA). Hawes and Steiner ended the song with a verse that made sure Boston voters knew which of the mayoral candidate was on their side: "Vote for Walter A. O'Brien/and fight the fare increase/Get poor Charlie off that MTA!"

The song didn't help O'Brien much, since he finished dead last in the election. He continued to practice progressive politics until he was caught up in Massachusetts's own version of the Red Scare. After refusing to answer questions when called before the Massachusetts Committee on Communism, O'Brien and eighty-four others were branded "Communists or Communist sympathizers." They had their names, addresses and places of employment published in the newspapers. Unable to find work, O'Brien returned to his native Maine, gave up politics, became a school librarian and tried to stay out of the glare of the Red Scare headlines.

The song endured. In 1957, folk singer Will Holt recorded it for Coral Records and it seemed well on its way to becoming a hit. Radio stations played it, record stores sold it and Life magazine even planned a feature story on Holt and the song, including photographs of him at the various subway stops mentioned in the song. Suddenly, though, radio stations stopped playing the song, stores stopped selling the record, and Life abruptly pulled its story--after protesters objected to the song for including the name of Walter O'Brien, and thus "glorifying" a radical.

The Kingston Trio later learned the song from Holt, whom Reynolds recalled meeting through Bay Area folk music circles. They decided to record it, but knowing what had happened to Holt, they made a slight change in the lyrics--dropping the name of Walter O'Brien and replacing it with the name of a fictional character, "George O'Brien."

Reynolds did not deny why they did it. "We changed the name so we wouldn't get into political trouble," he recalled last year. "Everything in those days was controversial. This was the McCarthy era. Who knows who would come knocking on your door?"

With Reynolds singing the lead, "M.T.A." was released on the Kingston Trio's second album on June 1, 1959, and as a single a week later. The single made it to number fifteen on the Billboard chart that year, and the album reached number one on the pop charts. Life, which had dropped the story on Will Holt and his Walter O'Brien version of the song, ran a cover story featuring the Kingston Trio and their George O'Brien version. Later that year, group won a Grammy as best folk performers of the year.

Fifty years ago, Nick Reynolds and the Kingston Trio were folk music pioneers. Since then, "M.T.A." has become a part of American folklore, reprinted in myriad songbooks, a staple at summer camps and recorded by many different performers--but only after the name of the man for whom it was written was removed from the lyrics.

In the 1950s world of folk music, there were places that even pioneers feared to go.

Peter Dreier is professor of politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College. He is co-author of The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City (University of California Press, 2005) and Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century (2nd edition, University Press of Kansas, 2005) Jim Vrabel is author of When In Boston: A Time Line & Almanac and co-author of John Paul II: A Personal Portrait of the Pope and the Man. A version of this article appeared in The Nation. The complete story of the Walter O'Brien campaign and the "M.T.A." song can be found in their article, "Banned in Red Scare Boston" in the Spring 2008 issue of Dissent magazine.

Comments

[DAE]

Unfortunately the legacy of those years still survives today in the inability of the progressive movement to put forth real alternatives to the political and socioeconomic status quo. Any radical critique of America is shunted off to the pages of marginal left wing journals that have a small coterie of readers. Other than Democracy Now there is hardly any voice from the left present on the network or cable news shows and anyone who is a self-avowed Marxist is anathema.

[RaderBarbarian]

"Tom Dooley" was the first record I ever bought. I was 16 years old, and my fundamentalist Christian parents would not permit "the devil's music" (rock & roll) in our house. I felt very brave buying that Kingston Trio record. I was in full teenage rebellion! A couple of years later, I fell in love with Joan Baez, and a year after that, along came Bob Dylan - and I was totally radicalized. All the praying in the world could not get this Humpty-Dumpty back together again and in church. I hung onto my love for the Kingston Trio, even though I knew they had become very un-cool. Those guys remained by secret little guilty pleasure. I have been a raging radical ever since. People to the People! Right On!

[Sportswoman]

I always liked them musically."Everglades"was one of my faves because I was young enough to be scared by the line"but you better keep moving and don't stand still 'cause if the skeeter don't get ya then the gators will." Rock was just too big, but there was this absolute sadness about the loss of Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens;ballads,love songs and folk were filling a void. When Dylan did Newport that sent the folk scene national and into a hootenany stratosphere. Peter Paul and Mary were my first concert--at 11! The Weavers, though, had a harmony no other group ever matched. Their version of Wimoweh was unbelievable--Seeger hit notes the Tokens could only dream of.

[Phaedrusnyc]

Reading this gave me mixed feelings. I've always been a fan of the Kingston Trio, even though I was born 30 years too late to have seen them in their heyday (blame Mom for that). But, time goes by, their apoliticism sometimes, frankly, annoys me. They were fantastic- great musicians with incredible presence- and it truly saddens me that three of the four "originals" (Guard was replaced by the late John Stewart a few years in) are now gone. But they could have done more than "lead the way"- they could have been truly inspirational on their own. Instead, they chose the path of least resistance. Yes, the Weavers' history loomed, but by 1958 they had already emerged from the blacklist. Would they have been allowed to advertise cigarettes if they were still toxic?

Sadly, the Kingston Trio's history has overshadowed ANOTHER trios- The Chad Mitchell Trio- who used had the same fresh-faced style and comic delivery but sang songs that were decidedly political, like "John Birch Society," and "Friendly Liberal Neighborhood Ku Klux Klan." They introduced "Blowin' In The Wind," promoted Tom Paxton's music (including "Draft Dodger Rag"), and eventually, introduced John Denver. Yet folkies seem to forget them whenever they review those years.

The Mitchell Trio weren'r blacklisted (hell, they guested on Dinah Shore!) Even Peter, Paul, and Mary, another somewhat "lightweight" group, sang protest songs.

Nick, you'll be missed terribly, and I still play your records. But your excuses...well, they're just that.

[paragrafH]

Now that was a fascinating read! I was an avid Kingston Trio fan as a teen at the time. As a rather clueless teen at the time, I never really noticed the segue to progressive folk except to notice the mock turtle necks morph into denim with beards. You have just filled in some very important blanks in my personal history, much the same way watching Mad Men has awakened memories of hostility towards women taken for granted. Thanks for the history lesson.

I would like to read or listen to that interview with Nick "No more drinks for the dwart" Reynolds. Is it available?

[oncethere]

Interesting. While the Kingston Trio avoided "political trouble," they still must be given credit for paving the way for Dylan and Ochs and others---and for keeping the tradition of Guthrie and Seeger alive. It is the unique person-artist who is willing to sacrifice himself in pursuing his truth without reservation. Phil Ochs really stood alone in the genre of political protest song in the 1960's; he was the true heir of Woody Guthrie.