History
Although The Kingston Trio had quickly risen in three short years from smoky gigs in the San Francisco peninsula's college town fraternity houses, bistros and bars to San Francisco's prestigious hungry i and Purple Onion, and then on to become nationally and internationally well known, accepted, and successful, Guard felt that by 1961 the Trio's musical style had become fixed and predictable, and its performances increasingly commercial. The Trio, Guard reportedly felt, had lost touch with the folk music roots that brought him to form The Calypsonians, which he had formed with Nick Reynolds and the group which had morphed into The Kingston Quartet and then finally with Bob Shane back from Hawaii into the Quartet's successor, The Kingston Trio. Guard also had concerns and conflicts with the way the Trio's publishing earnings were being handled. Those issues, combined with underlying, long simmering resentments and ego clashes between himself and his Trio colleague, former Punahou School classmate Shane over control and leadership of the now successful group that the three had formed, led Guard to finally leave the group. Shortly thereafter Guard formed the Whiskeyhill Singers with another Punahou high school friend, Cyrus Faryar, and the Trio's bassist and musicologist David "Buck" Wheat.
In line with Guard's intention to return to folk music, with its frequently uninhibited enthusiasm and vocal harmonies, Faryar suggested the group bring in an acquaintance of his, Judy Henske, to provide a female balance to the male harmonies, and in so doing, move definitively away from the Kingston Trio's male-only vocal format. Guard agreed, and the Whiskeyhill Singers, with Henske as female lead developed their own, often innovative, folk music mood, style, and sound.
Despite the group's intent to return to folk music along the lines of Pete Seeger's The Weavers, Guard's and Wheat's long association with the Trio and its musical style inevitably had an influence on the Singers' own musical style and arrangements. Complicating matters was the fact that the Trio's rollicking and successful performing style of uninhibited enthusiasm was also taken directly from Weavers-style folk music, leading to criticism that the musical style of the Singers was more "Trio-like" than being an original style of their own.
At the time that it disbanded, Guard said that The Whiskeyhill Singers had posted a loss of $10,000.
Read more about this topic: Whiskeyhill Singers
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