By George Lang
Staff Writer

Bob Shane, leader of the Kingston Trio, has teen wearing striped shirts and singing "Tom Dooley" for the past 43 years of his life. Shane, who started the group with Dave Guard and Nick Reynolds in the mid-'50s, said he never would have guessed that this would be his lifelong fate.

"I'd have shot myself," Shane joked during a recent phone interview.

"No, this is what we intended do in the first place," he said. "We were primarily live entertainers, and records were al-ways secondary. We got into the business because we enjoyed playing live, and the ego boost of making people feel good." Shane and his current triomates, George Grove and Bob Haworth, will perform at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Rose State Communications Center in Midwest City. It is one of scores of concerts the Kingston Trio will perform this year. Shane, 67, said he prefers it that way. "Normally speaking, we work 26 to 28 weeks a year on the road. That's been about the average for the last 43 years," he said.

"People always say, 'Why do you keep doing that for? Don't you have enough money?' I say, 'No.'"

Shane and Guard grew up in Hawaii, and both attended Menlo College in California during the early '50s. It was there that they hooked up with Reynolds and began performing calypso music as the Calypsonians, then changed their name to the Kingston Trio when their repertoire began to expand.

"Some woman on a live TV show insisted on my telling her why, when Nick and I were juniors in college, we thought We might want to do this professionally someday, and I kept saying, 'You don't want to know,'" he said.

"She said, 'Oh, I do,' and she turned to the audience, and the audience says, 'Yeah, yeah.' Finally, I said, 'OK, when you're a junior in college and you realize" you can attract women "without being a football player, it was fantastic!' Basically, it was that) and we really enjoyed singing and playing together."

The group earned its record deal through a series of successful appearances at a small San Francisco club called the Purple Onion, where they were opening for Phyllis Diller. The group designed fliers and heavily promoted themselves, resulting in a word-of-mouth buzz that brought them to the attention of Capitol Records.

"We sent them to all the people we knew in the Bay area, all these people in bars and college friends, and they packed the place," Shane said. "It got us a lengthy stay there, and in San Francisco, if you started seeing lines going around a club, you knew there must be something good there. What nobody tells you in the history is that the Purple Onion only seated 90 people."

The Kingston Trio recorded its self-titled debut album in 1958, and it only sold moderately well until a disc jockey in Salt Lake City started playing "Tom Dooley." More stations picked up the song, and it eventually became a successful single, selling millions of copies.. The album sold 1 million copies--an astounding number in 1958.

While the group played a variety of styles on that first album, Shane said the success of "Tom Dooley" secured their status as folk singers.

The trio enjoyed a string of successes over the next five years, including the singles "Scotch and Soda," "California," "Tijuana Jail" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" before tastes changed with the advent of the Beatles. Guard left the band in 1961 and was replaced by John Stewart, and the trio continued to record until 1967, when the group temporarily broke up. Shane revived the trio in 1972 with Grove and Roger Gambill, and since then, the Kingston Trio has been a popular touring band.

Shane said the trio's shows give the old fans what they want the most.

"Our concert is all the old songs, but we have 400 songs to choose from," he said. "We recorded 400 songs from '57 to '67, so we have a wide range of songs to choose from. But most of them are the songs that people remember the most."

-- Thank you to Barry Martin for sharing this article with the LINER NOTES

Last revised: February 23, 2006.