New Books In Music

After the huge success of Elvis Presley there was a moment when it looked as if rock ‘n’ roll might, indeed, be nothing more than a fad. Its successor in the world of popular music would be folk music, and its undisputed leader was the Kingston Trio. In Greenback Dollar: The Incredible Rise of the Kingston Trio (The Scarecrow Press, 2013) William J. Bush details the history of this landscape altering band. In it, Bush details the biographies of, first, the original three members of the band – Nick Reynolds, Bob Shane, and Dave Guard – and their meteoric rise to fame from 1958 through 1961. He then tells of the falling out and eventual replacement of Guard with John Stewart and the continued artistic and commercial success of the band through the sixties. Along the way, Bush (a friend of all the members of these two incarnations of the band) describes the important places and events that led to the massive popularity that followed the Trio. So rock music never did fade away, but the inf