Show business gimmick or otherwise a passing fancy or something of value, folk singing at the moment appears to be appealing to folks of every persuasion in virtually every precinct of the population hereabouts. What used to be an esoteric musical form usually performed by some nondescript mountain moaners who quite often resembled the characters they were singing about and who were usually paid off with a jug of hard stuff, is now a commercially "hot" music that has since twanged its way around the mountain into some of the poshest clubs in the hippest cities of the land.

Perhaps of all the varied personalities who have fashioned fold singing into an aural mobile of money, none can quite match the cusses of the Kingston Trio, three cherubic-looking lads who sing and play their instruments with verve, wit and talent. In just the last three years, the trio hare parlayed a light and inventive manner with a folk tune into a phenomenal number of record sales and a moneyed montage of club dates, concerts and TV appearances.

The group is composed of Dave Guard (our acknowledged leader), Bob Shane ("our sex symbol"), and Nick Reynolds ("the runt of the litter"). Each of the crew could pass for bathing suit models, which, in fact, they were before they started concertizing. On stage the three present an image of well-scrubbed collegians troubadouring outside a sorority house. The humorous-the frequently incisive-patter which they sprinkle between numbers provide the frosting for their cake. Their presentation oftimes is satirical but they can wrap the attention of an audience around a few bars of a lachrymose ballad when they are so inclined.

Folk music, at least to the Kingston Trio, is an articulate slice-of life . . . It communicates the pristine meaning of words. Guard, the six-foot-three-inch former Stanford University graduate, who usually parleys for the group, puts it this way:

"We are not students of folk music, in that sense of the word. "The basic thing for us is honest and worthwhile songs, that people can pick up and become involved in. Like ancient poetry, songs like that are successful because the audience participates in what the artist is doing."

"We don't collect old songs like the academic cats do," says Reynolds. "We get new tunes to look over every day. Each one of us has his ears open constantly to new material or old stuff that's good. As we progress musically in search of new material, we put only two restrictions on the type of songs we do: They must have a basic intelligent thought and be founded in good taste. Good songs are songs that can be made to live during the performance. When the performance is over, the piece is not significant anymore."

The Kingston's, along with bass player David Wheat, cover gargantuan distances in their private plane between engagements. In a recent period of less than two weeks they played dates in New York City; Billings, Montana; Seattle; Vancouver; Portland; Los Angeles; San Diego; Rexburg, Idaho; Salt Lake City; Tucson; and Washington, D.C. Each date is usually laminated with newspaper interviews, disc jockey pilgrimages and autograph derbys. Even such unscheduled events as a forced landing in an Indiana cornfield, as happened one Friday the 13th when their plane's radio and generator went dead, failed to keep the Trio from its appointed rounds.

Even though they have appeared at the French Lick, Indiana, and Newport Jazz Festivals, the Kingston Trio do not pretend to offer jazz in any form. "Hell, we don't even improvise," says Shane, jabbing a tongue against cheek, "but we’re all avid modern jazz fans. We're particularly hot on the Lambert-Ross-Hendricks group. I personally like a good inventive group. Anything too repetitious is a bore, including folk music."

Says Guard: "I like good rhythm-and-blues as well as the Modern Jazz Quartet and Thelonious Monk. We played opposite Monk at the Vanguard, and at first he seemed too far out. But his music grows on you. When we left, we were all Monk pluggers."

"I just like music," adds Reynolds. "'Most any kind. Chico Hamilton, Annie Ross, Jackie and Roy -- anybody who's good."

The group usually puts mileage on a new tune over about two months of personal appearances before it's added to the repertoire. For record sessions, the Trio can string a tune together in about two hours. The Trio members have a passion for perfection in the buffing and polishing of the tunes they will showcase on the road. Because of this, they have a surprisingly small number of selections -- forty tunes representing two years work -- that they consider worthy of their in-person appearances. For their own kicks, they have working arrangements of hundreds of fraternity house chorales and folk songs of virtually every country in the world. "The stuff we sing when we're springing for our own beer gasses us even though the harmonies are strictly Whiffenpoof," says Guard.

Back in 1957 the Kingstons were still poring over tile textbooks in colleges near San Francisco. Dave Guard, the group leader, was an honor student at Stanford University. Nick Reynolds and Bob Shone were matriculating a few miles away at Menlo College. A cousined interest in the native rhythms and tunes of all the countries of the world led to the formation of the group. They melded talents and were soon performing in student hangouts on campus for free beer.

A fortunate amalgam of sweaty salesmanship and talent soon made the Trio college favorites from Balboa to San Francisco. While performing in a colorful spot near the Stanford campus, The Cracked Pot, in the Spring of 1957, they caught the discerning ears of one Frank Werber, a Bay area publicist who saw facets of real pros in what otherwise would pass for just another bunch of campus chorusters whose ambitions were taller than their talents. In between sets, Weber got out his ballpoint and inked the crew to a personal management contract. Werber, who had released the chocks from other amateur groups in the past just to see them fizzle and fade, prodded, pushed and helped polish their act to a professional sheen. After weeks of intensive rehearsal with a balanced brace of international songs, the Kingston Trio was booked for brief appearances at the hungry i, Facks II and other Frisco bistros. Next carne a one-week engagement in the Bay City's famed new-talent showcase, the Purple Onion. The enterprising entrepreneurs of the spot were kept so tearfully happy that week playing Tic Tac Dough on the cash register that they extended the Trio's contract f₉r another few weeks. Seven months later, flushed with unaccustomed success, the Kingstons left the Purple Onion primed to tackle more lucrative engagements. They packed up their guitars, banjos and bongos and headed east. First stop on their itinerary was Chicago's Mr. Kelly's where they preached the gospel of folk singing to urbane laymen who were largely converts of the cool school. Before they took their leave of the club, the Kingstons held sway over a faithful flock. Next port of call was New York City, at the Blue Angel and the Village Vanguard, with more successes.

On May 1, 1958, they appeared on TV's Playhouse 90 in "Rumors of Evening," where they portrayed airline pilots and showcased their singing talents for a coast-to-coast audience. Later, they trekked westward to San Francisco and a summer-long stint at the Hungry i.

Then came "Tom Dooley," a song about a Blue Ridge mountaineer named Thomas E. Dula (in North Carolina it's pronounced Duley) who was hanged for murder in 1868. The Trio poignantly expressed Dula's spirit of resignation in song (it is said that Dula himself sang and played banjo on his way to the gallows), and in the parlance of the trade, the record "took off," selling 1,000,000 copies in a few weeks time. The record also brought posthumous fame to Dooley, whose all but forgotten grave in North Carolina is being restored by penitent publicity primed disciples.

It is perhaps significant that three of the group's most successful recordings have had certain empathy, which consciously or otherwise cobwebs the listener into a deep involvement. "Tom Dooley" and "Tijuana Jail" were two of these. So was "The M.T.A. Song," all about Charlie, the hapless rider on Boston's Metropolitan Transit Authority subway who seemed doomed to "ride forever 'neath the streets of Boston" because he hadn't the price for a transfer at the end of the line.

The Trio's material is catholic in nature. It finds its roots in virtually every ethnic group. A concert program or a club set might include an African hunting chant, a Western folk tune, a French ballad, an English ditty (masticated in a satirical cockney accent), Mexican folk tunes, a Calypso or two, and a patchwork quilt of Early American folk music.

Despite the gush of fame and the burgeoning bank account that accompanies it (they recently folded $5000 into their respective continental-styled jeans, for playing a coming-out party for the daughter of a Texas oilman), the Trio still wears the same size hats they started with. "Maybe we're odd-balls with a franchise on good luck for the moment. Whatever it is we've got, we’re damn grateful for it. And we don't try to get too passionately impressed over all the publicity we've been getting," explains Dave Guard.

Music has always been an accepted part of the lives of Guard, Reynolds and Shane. Both Guard and Shane were born and reared in Hawaii where they tickled ukuleles and sang the native chants almost as soon as they learned to talk. Throughout their teens, Waikiki Beach (they called it "their glorified sand box") was their playground and they learned to skin dive and ride surfboards along with the native natives of the island. In addition to the songs of Hawaii, they learned the music of the South Pacific and the Orient from visiting yachtsmen and travelers.

Nick Reynolds was born stateside in Coronado, California, just outside of San Diego. The son of a career Naval officer, Reynolds was a seasoned world traveler long before he entered high school. Each time the family moved, he added a new set of songs to his repertoire. Each member of the Kingstons is a high school and college athlete. Among them, they hold trophies, letters and other awards in track, tennis, football, baseball, swimming and basketball. Guard is also a judo expert.

With success, domesticity came to the soft-sell folk singers. Guard is married to the daughter of the treasurer of a chain of department stores. Reynolds, who will inherit a sizeable fortune from his great-uncle, is married to the former Joan Harris, a comedienne who used to fracture the customers in a bistro up the street from the hungry i. Reynolds gave up sports car racing a few years ago when a close friend was killed in a crash but he still gets his kicks tooling around in his Fiat-Nardi-Vignale sports coupe, perhaps the only one of its kind in the United States. Shane wed an heiress from Atlanta and is working now to interest her in the things he enjoys . . . like watching bull fighting and water-skiing.

Their racing round of club and concert dates makes some family travel a necessity. Explains Reynolds, "We may look like tennis bums, but man, underneath we've got stability!" Soon the three couples will take separate excursions - an offbeat idea in their usually cadenced design for group togetherness. "This Trio," as one of them put it, "has got to quit acting like Siamese triplets."

In spite of their experience with "Tom Dooley," and, to a lesser extent, "Tijuana Jail," both of which the teenagers were hot for, the Trio continues to develop a library of tunes it feels is directed to the more sophisticated adults rather than the fickle juveniles. "At least for the moment, kids aren't really ready to listen to music," Guard says. "Dooley was the exception to the rule. But basically the kids want something more physical, that doesn't require much thought"

^"Our best audiences are in the south and in colleges," Reynolds adds ⁴'Listeners in the South are hip too. We found that the natives of Nashville and Memphis, regardless of race, put down Elvis and Fabian and dig Bo Diddley. New York tends to be more square."

"As for colleges," Shane contributed, "we sang to 4,500 students at Michigan and a wild crowd -- 4000 of then -- at Notre Dame. They shook up the Ivy!"

Last September the group inked a contract to perform TV and radio commercials for a major beverage outfit. Throughout 1960 the Kingstons will be adjectives for the bubbly stuff and will take in about $200,000 for the chores, mostly in residuals.

Their successful approach to folklore in song has encouraged other groups to go out and do likewise. As if the approach is not enough, even the origins of many of the groups are similar to the Kingstons. Last December, for example, a new folk singing group by the name of the Chad Mitchell Trio opened up at the Blue Angel ii' New York. The group, fresh out of college in Spokane, ran smoothly through African, Caribbean and Scottish love songs, a railroad work song and a spurious spoof of the chaos wrought by Sigmund Freud While the Mitchell group has a fine sound, a familiar feel with a ballad, and a skilled delivery, they consciously or otherwise ditto the approach of the Kingstons.

Another group tagged "The Folk Lords" recently signed a contract with NBC to perform some of their specialty material on TV. The "Lords" are a trio of crew cut collegians, two from Georgetown and one from the Westminster Choir College at Princeton, New Jersey. The group appears to heft guitars and banjos with the best and have a feeling for the nuances or harmony. One of their spotlight numbers is a rousing African chant (whose principal elements seemed to be made up of the words, "ah-weem-ah-way"). Here, too, the group’s approach to the currently lucrative folk formula is more imitative than personal.

As for the Kingstons, they remain fanatically faithful to the genus or folk music that brought them together in the first place. Whatever happens with the group, they appear to have triggered a trend which, for better or worse, will Undoubtedly shape the musical tastes of the country for some time to come. In any event, the folk music movement egged on by tile Kingstons should be a beneficial progression from today’s menu of rock 'n roll where whatever is not worth saying is usually sung.