Greenback Dollar: The Incredible Rise of the Kingston Trio by William J. Bush (review)

Greenback Dollar is a major contribution to the history of the folk revival. This volume is especially important considering the central, indeed formative, place of the Kingston Trio within the revival. Bush’s biography is deeply informed by his background as a music journalist specializing in acoustic music. He digs into the business and professional life of the group, drawing on primary resources by relying largely on interviews with the surviving members of the Trio and with those who knew them. The greatest strength of this book, by far, is the ready access the author had to his subjects and the lengthy interviews that illuminate numerous issues in the Trio’s tumultuous history. Another aspect of this biography that is especially welcome is the attention paid to the Trio’s various bassists, who were often at least as, if not more, musically sophisticated than the Trio members themselves (e.g., p. 88 on David “Bucky” Wheat). Finally, Bush writes unabashedly from the standpoint of a fan. He is always ready to apologize for the trio’s faux pas, and makes no bones about avoiding the fraught issue of “authenticity,” which was much bruited about in the folk music literature of the time. Bush largely avoids discussions of contemporary journalism, except for trade coverage and some mentions in the popular press.

Aside from a brief introduction, Bush’s approach is thoroughly chronological. He spends considerable time on the early years of Dave Guard, Bob Shane, and Nick Reynolds, and carefully explores the formative musical experiences of the Trio members, with Shane and Reynolds growing up in California and Guard in Hawaii. Because of this, Tahitian, Hawaiian, and Mexican musics (or at least the Trio’s take on them) became organic parts of the Trio repertory.

Bush also explores the various professional activities and false starts of the Trio members in the early 1950s, especially noting Dave Guard’s professional and semiprofessional performances in Hawaii. This begins a bit of a narrative in which Guard’s baritone voice, by turns booming and subtle, his bass-heavy Martin guitar, and his skill at arranging became the musical foundation of the first iteration of the Trio (the “Guard years”).

Bush investigates the rather unusual set of circumstances in which the Trio members met in California, and explores their early musical experiences in some detail. He delves into various situations in which the band had to learn on its feet, with examples such as Dave Guard learning to play the banjo by holing up with Pete Seeger’s How to Play the 5-String Banjo and practicing the Seeger two-finger style constantly (p. 70). Anyone can hear from the early banjo cuts on the Bear Family’s Kingston Trio compilation that the learning process was hardly straightforward, but Bush sheds light on how Guard fairly quickly became a competent and effective, if not virtuoso, banjo player (Kingston Trio, The Guard Years, Bear Family BCD 16160 JK [1997], CDs; Kingston Trio, The Stewart Years, Bear Family BCD 16161 JK [2000], CDs).

This book, naturally, also explores both the vocal and instrumental arrangements the Trio used. In addition to their vaunted vocal blend, which was the result of both carefully-planned arrangements and somewhat hit-or-miss rehearsal techniques, the interviews with Guard and Shane illustrate how they came to combine the deep bass of Guard’s (and later John Stewart’s) guitar with the relatively high tenor guitar of Nick Reynolds, resulting in an acoustic sound that somewhat resembled the bass-and-high-hat combination of a jazz ensemble, but also filled out more musical space (in terms of register) than would have been possible with two guitars or banjos alone. Both the complex, yet seemingly easy, vocal harmonies and the instrumental arrangements became hallmarks of the Trio’s sound.

Bush devotes considerable...