Nick Reynolds, who as a college student grabbed a guitar, donned a broad-striped button-down shirt and quickly helped propel the 1950s folk music revival to the top of the pop music charts as a founding member of the Kingston Trio, died Wednesday in San Diego. He was 75.
Reynolds had been hospitalized in recent weeks with acute respiratory disease, his son, Josh Reynolds, said Thursday.
The group's recording of the tragic 19th century folk ballad "Tom Dooley" went to No. 1 in 1958 and earned Reynolds and his partners Dave Guard and Bob Shane a Grammy for best country and western performance at the first Grammy Awards ceremony. In that inaugural year, the Grammys had no categories dedicated to folk music, which was booming on college campuses around the country. The following year, the group's album "The Kingston Trio at Large" picked up a second Grammy for its members. That album spent 15 weeks at No. 1 in 1959.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday, October 04, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 51 words Type of Material: Correction
Nick Reynolds: The obituary of Kingston Trio co-founder Nick Reynolds in Friday's California section reported that he rejoined the Grammy-winning group from 1991 to 2003. In fact, he rejoined the band in 1988 and retired in 1999. Also, some versions of the article omitted the 1991 death of bandmate Dave Guard.
"The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta. . . . From Odetta, I went to Harry Belafonte, the Kingston Trio, little by little uncovering more as I went along," Bob Dylan once said.
Reynolds typically handled the middle part of the trio's scintillating three-part harmonies, sometimes adding bongos, congas and other percussion accents. Although the group's music generally shied away from the politicized content of such forebears as Woody Guthrie and the Weavers, its commercial breakthrough in the late 1950s represented a clean-cut alternative to the sexualized rock 'n' roll of Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and others that had American teens in its grip. And it helped set the stage for folk-rooted protest singers such as Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul & Mary.
"It really started with the Weavers, in the early '50s," Reynolds said in a 2006 interview, referring to the New York-based quartet that included Pete Seeger. "We were big fans of theirs, but they got blacklisted in the McCarthy era. Their music was controversial. Suddenly, they couldn't get any airplay; they couldn't get booked into the big hotels, nothin'.
"We played their kind of music when we were first performing in colleges. But when we formed the trio . . . we had to sit down and make a decision: Are we going to remain apolitical with our music? Or are we going to slit our throats and get blacklisted for doing protest music? We decided we'd like to stay in this business for a while. And we got criticized a lot for that. . . . If Bob Dylan or Joan Baez had come out at that time, they'd have been dead in the water. But four or five years later, [their music] became commercially viable."
