Talk:The Kingston Trio/GA1

GA Review

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Hi. I signed up to review the article. I will be reading it over the next few days, giving comments here. --Moni3 (talk) 12:56, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

1. It is well written Please address the following issues:

   The lead:

   List the members of the band in the lead.

   The parenthetic statements of how many weeks the songs spent on the charts is unnecessary for the lead.

   This sentence: As significantly, the "phenomenal popularity"[8] and massive record sales of the Kingston Trio in its early days made acoustic folk music commercially viable, paving the way for singer-songwriter, folk rock, and Americana artists who followed in their wake. is difficult to understand. Not sure what it's trying to say.

   Music and controversy

   Some explaining is necessary here on the view that folk music should not have been popularized. I remember once I went to a Janis Ian concert, and she said that she had been excised from the folk community for using drums, making it sound as if they were purists of the first order. The section should open with this explanation then go into why Frank Proffitt did not like what the Trio did to Tom Dooley? What was the song like before they recorded it?

   Cites

   Go for consistent citation styles. Make sure web sources all have publishers, dates, and access dates. I was unable to read the very fine font of the cites with the multiple reflist width and column tags. I think that's an issue of WP:ACCESS.

2. It is broad in its coverage.

   Seems to cover the topic well.

3. It is neutral

   A few instances of missing citations. My copy edits added cite needed tags. The Top 40 Hits In Chronological Order section needs cites.

4. It is stable

   No edit wars or reverts.

5. It is illustrated, where possible, by images

   The nonfree images in the article do not have sufficient rationales. To use a nonfree image, it must be integral to understanding the concept. A source must mention the image as important to the subject. Please see Non free content criteria. If the source does indeed mention an image being important in some way, the non free image rationale must reflect why it is important--what the source says. If you cannot find a source to mention an image, the image should probably be removed.

Ok. Let's work on getting these issues fixed and I'll give the article another look. You have seven days to fix these issues. I'll probably go into more detail about making your cites uniform, but larger issues need to be fixed first. It's quite a well-written article so far. I'd like to see it improved. Because, you know, the Reverend Mr. Black was my old man... --Moni3 (talk) 17:39, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Hi Moni3 - I did most of the editing to upgrade the article, and thanks for the thoughtful and thorough review. I am very short on time at the moment and need to digest some of these points and certainly respond cordially to a couple of them. I do need to understand, however, the problem with the image rationale.

The pictures, used by permission of the copyright holder and released, are of two configurations that have not existed for 42 years and more - 3 of the 4 people depicted are dead. There are virtually no non-copyrighted images of this group available at such a distance of time. My understanding, however, is that a GA article needs to be illustrated - and I'm not sure how an illustration of the subject of the article could be anything but intrinsic to it. It seems as though I am caught between a rock and a hard place: GA needs illustrations; the only illustrations available are copyrighted and are the only illustrations genuinely germane to the subject of the article.

I can certainly go into more detail and provide more citations on a number of points as requested - but the article as written weighed in at 4700 words, and I was afraid that any longer might be frowned upon. The purist vs. commercial folksinger, exactly as you expressed it, is a complex issue that raged at the time and has been largely forgotten now. I'd love to expand upon it but, again, fear the length issue.

Thanks again, and I'll see what I can do here. regards, Sensei48 (talk) 00:22, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Hi, Sensei48. Ok, let's deal with the images first. This is often the most difficult to understand (for me) and work around.

• File:Beatniks.jpg (nice name), File:Sunnyside.jpg, and File:Reunion1.jpg are marked as a copyrighted non-free images. However, now that I read down further, it says that Bob Shane has given you (or someone) permission to use the images. What you need to do is make sure Shane has released the image under the GNU Free Documentation License, using this wording: I own the copyright to the images found attached in this email. I grant permission to copy, distribute and/or modify these documents under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
• This is very important: make sure Mr. Shane agrees to that wording specifically. You will not be successful if he simply "releases it to Wikipedia".
• Email the images to permissions@wikipedia.org with that statement I just provided and a record of your exchanges with Mr. Shane with his contact info attached.
• Once that is done, you will get an OTRS ticket number. Let me know when you have done it and I will assist you with changing the information on the image pages. If you run into problems along the way, we may have to be creative.

• As for the issue of length, fret not. It should be as long as it needs to be. I did not find the length prohibitive. I'm not really suggesting adding more content necessarily, but the places I indicated need cites.
• I'm not really suggesting adding more to the Folk music label section either, but rearranging how the section starts would be important. The section (not a single simple paragraph) should structurally resemble something like: The Kingston Trio were billed/categorized as a folk group. Traditionally, folk musicians have prided themselves in criteria 1, criteria 2, criteria 3, etc., of what comprises folk music. Musicians who differed from this formula were met with reaction A, reaction B, and/or reaction C. The Kingston Trio's music differed from folk music in example X, example Y, example Z. Furthermore, they did not consider their own music folk. Other folk musicians and singer/songwriters said this about the popularity of the Kingston Trio...
• You get what I'm saying? Now the section starts with a short discussion of how a major influence of "Tom Dooley" disliked it. It doesn't say why he did really, or what the song was before the Trio got their grubby mitts on it. Without previous understanding of how much purists folk musicians are it reads very confusing. --Moni3 (talk) 00:43, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick reply and clarifications, Moni3.

1)The permissions from Mr. Shane should be available fairly promptly and I'll get on that as per the instructions right away.

2) Many of the "citation needed" points will also be easy to remedy, especially from The Kingston Trio On Record, which is the only full-length book published on the group to date and which is structured around histories/discussions the albums and singles released by the group. I also feared BTW having too many refs. Other sources can also be brought to bear.

3) I understand your comment on the folk music/purist/TD section, but it's possible that the issue is not reducible to a slight re-working. It was actually very complex both musically and financially - in fact, an entire book came out a few years back (Richard Weissman's Which Side Are You On?, Weissman being an "urban traditionalist" who was nonetheless a member of the pop folk group The Journeymen with John Phillips and Scott McKenzie - as I said, it gets pretty complicated) that attempted to make sense of the problem. I'll see what I can do to present sourced clarifications. I will say, though, that I thought the opening sentence in the "Music and Controversy" section about the KT being at odds with traditionalists, following as it did the point about "scathing criticism" contributing to Guard's departure at the beginning of the "second phase" section, was simply a transition from a point already made to an elucidation of the same in this latter section. Will work on it.

4)Last, a technical problem of sorts. The opening sentence of Bruce Eder's KT bio from the AllMusic guide is the clearest statement of the point of the last sentence of the lead - Eder remarks that the KT created a market "where none had existed before" for acoustic folk music as a commercial enterprise. No major distribution label following the Weavers' blacklisting from Decca had any acoustic folk performers (and the Weavers' Decca recordings were all heavily orchestrated and not at all acoustic). But it seems to me that the lead should make the point with the accompanying reference but that again the quotation and elucidation themselves belong in the "Influence" section. So the technical point - I don't want to overuse that one sentence from Eder. Suggestions for clarification of the last sentence of the lead - which is the key to the group's notability and essentially the thesis of the article - would be appreciated. regards, Sensei48 (talk) 07:31, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

This is what I meant: (Hope you're not color blind. I added a sentence in green)

Folk music label

Almost from its inception, the Kingston Trio found itself at odds with the traditional music community. Urban folk musicians of the time (whom Bob Dylan referred in Rolling Stone as "the left-wing puritans that seemed to have a hold on the folk-music community") frequently associated folk music with leftist politics and were contemptuous of the Trio's deliberate political neutrality. Peter Dreier of Occidental College observed that "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." A series of scathing articles appeared over several years in Sing Out! magazine, a publication that combined articles on traditional folk music with political activism. Its editor Irwin Silber referred to "the sallow slickness of the Kingston Trio" and in an article in the spring 1959 issue Ron Radosh said that the Trio brought "good folk music to the level of the worst in Tin Pan Alley music" and referred to them as "prostitutes of the art who gain their status as folk artists because they use guitars and banjos." Following the Trio's performance at the premier Newport Folk Festival in 1959 folk music critic Mark Morris wrote "What connection these frenetically tinselly showmen have with a folk festival eludes me...except that it is mainly folk songs that they choose to vulgarize."

Frank Proffitt, the Appalachian musician whose version of "Tom Dooley" the Trio re-arranged, watched their performance on a television show, and wrote in reaction, "They clowned and hipswung. Then they came out with 'This time tomorrow, reckon where I’ll be/If it hadn't a' been for Grayson/I'd a been in Tennessee.' I began to feel sorty sick. Like I’d lost a loved one. Tears came to my eyes. I went out and bawled on the ridge." Sentence here about the way Proffitt arranged the song or intended it to be sung/played. As recently as 2006, folk traditionalist and influential banjo master Billy Faier remarked "I hear and see very little respect for the folk genre" in their music and described the Trio's repertoire as "a mishmash of twisted arrangements that not only obscure the true beauty of the folk songs from which they derive, but give them a meaning they never had."

However, Trio members never claimed to be folksingers and were never comfortable with the label. The liner notes for the group's first album featured a quotation from Dave Guard asserting that "We are not folksingers in the accepted sense of the word." Guard later told journalist Richard Hadlock in Downbeat Magazine: "We are not students of folk music; the basic thing for us is honest and worthwhile songs that people can pick up and become involved in." Nick Reynolds added in the same article: "We don't collect old songs in the sense that the academic cats do... 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." Bob Shane remarked years later: "To call the Kingston Trio folksingers was kind of stupid in the first place. We never called ourselves folksingers... We did folk-oriented material, but we did it amid all kinds of other stuff. But they didn't know what to call us with our instruments, so Capitol Records called us folksingers and gave us credit for starting this whole boom."

Over the years, the Kingston Trio expanded its song selection beyond the rearranged traditional numbers, calypso songs, and Broadway show tunes that had appeared on its first several albums. In an obituary for Nick Reynolds (d. October 1, 2008), Spencer Leigh wrote in Britain's Sunday Independent:

Looking at their repertoire now, it is apparent that the Kingston Trio was far more adventurous than is generally supposed. They introduced "It Was A Very Good Year" in 1961, later a standard for Frank Sinatra, and they were one of the first to spot the potential of English language versions of Jacques Brel's songs by recording "Seasons in the Sun" in 1963. They encouraged young songwriters including Hoyt Axton ("Greenback Dollar"), Rod McKuen ("Ally Ally Oxen Free", "The World I Used to Know") and Billy Edd Wheeler ("Reverend Mr Black"). Best of all, in 1962 they introduced listeners to one of the most poignant songs ever written, the anti-war ballad "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" by Pete Seeger, formerly with the Weavers.

Further, Peter Dreier points out that "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." The passage of time may well have made the controversy moot. Writing in The Guardian, again in an obituary for Reynolds, Ken Hunt asserted that "The Kingston Trio helped to turn untold numbers of people on to folk music... they put the boom in folk boom. The Kingston Trio carried the torch overseas, most notably with their international hit of 1958, Tom Dooley. They were the greatest of the bands to emerge after the McCarthy-era blacklisting of folk musicians and breathed new air into the genre."

Let me know what you think. --Moni3 (talk) 12:24, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Ah, now I see! That's clearer. I realize now that what I was presuming to be common historical understanding of the factionalism that ran rampant to the time is not at all common understanding. Your initial review brought up two points - Janis Ian's remark ("of course," I'm thinking) and "wasn't folk music supposed to be commercial?" ("how could it be in the ethos of that time,") thought I) - that made me realize how little of this tri-partite split (traditional rural musicians vs. urban traditionalists vs. commercial popularizers) is understood today. If I can distill a bit of that idea into something concise but sourced, I think I'd try to lay some groundwork earlier in the article with it. But I do agree that without prior knowledge of this long-dead controversy the original wording could be confusing, and this suggested edit does indeed clarify the issue. I'll see to that green Proffitt sentence ASAP.

regards, Sensei48 (talk) 14:01, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Oh, and further thanks for the re-write work above. I somehow get the feeling that this sort of effort is not standard m.o. for a GA reviewer... Sensei48 (talk) 14:16, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

It quite depends on the reviewer. Find a good one and give them gifts and chocolate. I've gotten absolute gems and duds. It's a bit of a crap shoot.

If you agree with the rearrangement of the Folk music label, feel free to copy and paste it into the section.

I thought the last sentence in the lead started out confusing, but I understand what it was trying to get across... I think. You've removed the clunky part, leaving The "phenomenal popularity"[8] and massive record sales of the Kingston Trio in its early days made acoustic folk music commercially viable, paving the way for singer-songwriter, folk rock, and Americana artists who followed in their wake. Would be helpful to say who considered their popularity phenomenal. Someone notable, I hope? As in "Music historian? Richie Unterberger categorized the Kingston Trio as having "phenomenal popularity"; their massive record sales in the early days of their career made acoustic folk music commercially viable, paving the way for singer-songwriter, folk rock, and Americana artists who followed in their wake."

Let me know when you've taken care of the cite needed and clarification needed tags, and the progress on the image permissions. If you're working on stuff during the 7 days I'll extend the review until everything is taken care of, hoping of course, it does not drag on for weeks or months. When you think you're ready to tackle the uniformity of the citations, I can address that. There is, unfortunately, a bit of tedious formatting to spank the appearance of cites into a somewhat professional shape. Once I spent 4 hours fixing all the cites in an FA before it was passed. I had to go through three other articles before it became second nature to type them all out the same way every time. Some issues in producing GAs and FAs are more an uphill climb than others. --Moni3 (talk) 15:42, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm hoping to tackle the references using wiki templates (book, news, etc.) this weekend if time allows. Airproofing (talk) 18:10, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Moni3 and Airproofing. I too will get on the cites, the lead, and the controversy section later today or tomorrow. For the moment though (and to indicate that I don't intend to let the process drag on) - I emailed Bob Shane last night and this morning received the properly worded reply as directed above. Also as directed above, I've forwarded that email (with Shane's electronic signature) to the permissions@wikipedia.org. Sensei48 (talk) 19:13, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Sensei - I've got over a dozen of them formatted using templates already. Will try to upload a them tonight. - Bruce Airproofing (talk) 20:28, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Intermediate edits: As per the GA review above I have a) added sourced material about Proffitt's "Tom Dooley" and listed the source under, well, "Sources"; b) included the Wikilinked names of the original members in the lead; c) eliminated the specific chart rankings from the lead; d) rephrased the last sentence of the lead for clarity as suggested.

Two FYIs, related - sources Eder, Unterberger, Cantwell, Cohen, Einarson and Dreier are the absolute heavyweights in this field. They have all published extensively on the topic and have been reviewed and discussed widely. That accounts for pt 2- my desire was to make the sourcing for this article, especially the last 2 sections, absolutely rock solid, which I why I tried to use as many direct links to websites for sourcing as possible (even at times when I have a hard copy of the same material) so that the actual text of the source could be checked with a click or two.

Citation needed points next. Sensei48 (talk) 21:24, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

I put in the in-line citations using wiki templates. They should all be pretty uniform now. (Makes for difficult editing, don't you think?) Anyway, might need some tweaking but they look pretty good... better than some featured articles! As far as size and readability, they look the same as the latest featured articles on my computer screen. Also... Good job, Jim. This is a fine article in my opinion. Should be featured soon.Airproofing (talk) 18:04, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Next Intermediate Edits

OK, I've provided clarification of wording on Sinatra and Cole and sourcing for all but the last CN tags. I've used the templates in the same way that Airproofing did, so the new sources should conform in style to the great work that Air has done. The last CN request, though, is hard to figure out how to provide. The most comprehensive KT discography currently available on the web is the one that Airproofing developed (with some additions of later stuff by me) for Wikipedia. No commercial site nor even the main KT site is as complete, especially as regards the recent releases mentioned in the article over the last four or five years. What IS as complete is the KT discography on FaceBook, which I helped to develop with Mrs. Shane and other fan contributors - but though it is an official discography we probably cannot use it because it is not accessible to general readers on the web who aren't registered on FaceBook as "fans." What to do? Could we not point to Airproofing's discography?

That leaves but one unresolved issue - sourcing for the Top 40 hits. I can source most of those from The Kingston Trio On Record, but maybe not all of them. That section was already in place when I went to work on the article in mid-July. I considered removing it (and I did remove an unsourced extensive list of "Famous KT songs" or something like that) because I didn't think it was necessary, because it ran somewhat oblique to the drift of the article (whose emphasis is almost always on album sales), and because it is a much less "notable" list than the Billboard chart facts for albums mentioned in the lead.

If Moni3 thinks it's important, we could undoubtedly do the sourcing, but should wait for some advice.Sensei48 (talk) 07:23, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Addendum: I've sandboxed a possible replacement for the unsourced singles section with a sourced expansion of the album chart rankings elided from the lead here: User:Sensei48/Sandbox

Let me add a rationale for this change. The guiding principle behind my re-write of the article was notability - why was this group, remembered less and lauded less than many others of its era, a significant force in American popular music? Beyond the whole folk music thing, the KT was an important part of the transition in the record industry from the dominance of 45rpms in total sales in the 1950s to LPs dominating in the 1960s and later. The KT was not the sole or primary factor, but they likely rank in importance after only (in order of importance based on Billboard charts) original cast albums from Broadway shows and the films based upon them, Elvis Presley albums, and Harry Belafonte albums.

The KT's rankings in the areas cited still stand after 50 years, and that's far more impressive and notable than their relatively modest output of single 45rpms. Contrast The Kingston Trio discography with The Everly Brothers discography. (And User:Airproofing was instrumental in creating both.) Both groups started recording in 1958 and had their most productive years between then and 1964. The Everly's album rankings are as relatively unimpressive as the KT's singles are - but the Everly's singles rankings are significant and key to their notability in the same way that the KT's albums are. Hence, I'd say that in keeping with the general tenor of the whole KT article (which doesn't go into much detail on things like instruments, musical style, individual songs, and more - all of which could be topics for legitimate secondary articles) the sandboxed album rankings support the information presented more effectively than the singles section does. Sensei48 (talk) 17:05, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Be Bold: I reworked the sandboxed info and used it in the article to replace the "singles" section; reference formatting I believe is correct. If we don't like it, we can rv to the singles and source them. Sensei48 (talk) 18:28, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

And Complete Work In A Week

...which I believe we have done. I added web citations to specific articles about the releases of the four record companies at the end of the "third phase" section. All sources are formatted consistently with Wiki guidelines, and all text changes and citation needed points have been answered as described above. Please let me/us know if further work is required.Sensei48 (talk) 03:47, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Prose-wise, the article meets the criteria. Citation wise, it also passes. The last issue needing to be taken care of is the images. Can you confirm that you sent the three images and Bob Shane's permissions to permissions@wikipedia.org, per my instructions? If so, I will assist you in changing the licensing for these images and the article can get the GA pass. --Moni3 (talk) 14:38, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks , Moni3. Per your instructions, I had Bob Shane send me the permissions exactly as you phrased them above with pictures attached, and I've forwarded that email (with Shane's electronic signature) to the permissions@wikipedia.org. We had to re-send it on Sat. night because he forgot to attach the pictures the first time, but permissions has now had the corrected email(with my request and Shane's response, as directed) since Sat. I could of course forward the email to you also if necessary. Sensei48 (talk) 20:20, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

No, I don't need it. I'm about to edit the image pages. Watch for my changes and make appropriate edits indicated. Let me know if you have questions. --Moni3 (talk) 20:25, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

OK - I followed your prompts as best I could with as much detail as is available all these years later. The dates for the first two are the ones that Mr. Shane sent me; the information for "Reunion1) is exact because I know the photographer. Sensei48 (talk) 20:54, 8 September 2009 (UTC)