OCTOBER, 2018
HERITAGE MUSIC REVIEW
ELECTRONIC EDITION: Now free to email subscribers and supported by tasteful, music-oriented advertising with a unique news-format approach.
A monthly guide to early rock, blues, country, folk, and traditional jazz in the Seattle area and beyond.
Editor and Publisher: Doug Bright
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CONTENTS—OCTOBER, 2018
PART ONE: THE BROTHERS FOUR: ON THE MOVE IN A NEW MILLENNIUM
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PART ONE: THE BROTHERS FOUR: ON THE MOVE IN A NEW MILLENNIUM
By Doug Bright
A lot of groups have come and gone since America's popular folk music revival began with the Weavers in the late 1940's. Yet the Brothers Four, a group formed strictly for fun at the University of Washington in 1956, are still going strong. Now in their sixtieth year as a professional entity, the Brothers Four are not about to be confined to the nostalgia bin. Far from content with re-hashing their greatest hits, they are constantly writing, gathering, and recording new material, touring internationally, marketing themselves dynamically on the Internet, and all the while, maintaining the rich, folk-based vocal harmony and good-humored patter that launched them in the first place.
It all started in late 1956 in Seattle at the University of Washington, where Mike Kirkland, Dick Foley, John Paine, and Bob Flick met as Phi Gamma Delta fraternity brothers. Flick, a Seattle native who served as the group's bass player, was a communications major studying TV production and station management. Banjoist/guitarist John Paine from Wenatchee was majoring in Russian and Far Eastern studies. Seattle's Dick Foley, who defined the group's sound as primary lead singer, had spent years studying piano and composition but was majoring in electrical engineering. Tenor Mike Kirkland, an Everett native who played banjo and guitar, had come to the University on football and pre-med scholarships. "None of us had a formal music education," Foley explained to a Columbia Records interviewer in 1960, "but we've all had lessons of some sort and we all like music."
"We're within one class of each other," Bob Flick elaborated in this publication 43 years later, "so when we all met, we were either freshmen or sophomores. Everybody used to sing in those days: it was kind of fun. We used to sit around and sing folk songs at this fraternity house. There would be twelve, fifteen guys joining in, and we were the ones who had the instruments. Calypso music was very popular. We would listen to records--Easy Riders or Weavers or things like that. Pop music in those days was fairly orchestrated, so finding music that was easy to replicate was pretty cool."
"We worked up a few songs for Rush Week parties," Mike Kirkland explained in the Columbia interview, "and had such a good time we did more and got to sing at other parties around campus. Before we knew it, we were performing some place or other every weekend."
One day in 1958 Mike Kirkland got a completely unexpected call. The young woman on the phone, identifying herself as secretary to the manager of Seattle's famed Colony Club, invited Kirkland to bring the group down to the club the following Saturday for an audition. When the four collegiate musicians arrived at the appointed place and time with instruments in hand, they found a surprised club manager who had no knowledge of them or their audition and, in fact, didn't even have a secretary. Obviously, they concluded, the call had been a prank played on them by a rival fraternity.
Nevertheless, they won the day. "Well, while you're here," club manager Jack Beard suggested, "do a couple of songs." As a result, the Brothers Four were booked on weekends at the Colony Club for 26 weeks. "Jack was a very savvy, experienced club owner," Bob Flick recalled. "He knew the trends of the day, so he hired us."
By this time, of course, the Kingston Trio, with their debut
album
and its hit single "Tom Dooley", had raised the fledgling folk revival to instant popularity, especially with students, and the Brothers Four capitalized handsomely, packing the Colony Club with collegiate fans every weekend. The gig didn't pay well, but the performing experience it delivered was invaluable. By the spring of 1959, the Brothers Four had honed their show into a tight, entertaining mix of rich vocal harmony, solid accompaniment, and hilarious comedic patter. Brimming with well-earned confidence, they took advantage of the University's spring break to try their luck in San Francisco.
Their effort won them an engagement at the prestigious Hungry i, where the Kingston Trio had just recorded a top-selling concert
album.
Thanks to some fraternity pals who lived in the Bay Area, they were seen and heard by Mort Lewis, who was managing jazz legend Dave Brubeck's career at the time. Keenly aware of the Brothers Four's market potential in the newly created folk boom, he urged them to send him a demo tape for submission to Brubeck's label, Columbia Records.
Thanks to Bob Flick's connections on and off campus, making the demo was an easier, more relaxed process than it might otherwise have been. "We did it at a couple of places," he explained. "I was in the school of communications. I was the production manager for the station, KUOW, so we would go in at night, put a tape on, grab a mike, and do some singing there. I used to work at KING Television on the weekends during college. During the summers I would work down there as the switchboard operator and tour guide. Frosty Fowler took an interest in us, invited us to come down, and helped us out with a couple of tunes. We put together about eight or ten tunes on this audition tape."
Columbia reacted to the demo with all the enthusiasm Mort Lewis expected, inviting the group to come to New York that summer for a second round of auditions. "It was nice to ride along this little adventure wave," Flick remembered, "so we decided to accept the offer to go to New York that summer. All our families were extremely supportive. Maybe they privately felt that it was a summertime deal and come fall we would be back to finish up our final few quarters of school which, of course, never happened."
On July 4th, 1959, the Brothers Four flew to New York for the auditions that soon resulted in their first recording session. "In the offices where even the best young talents find it hard to get a smile, feet were tapping and the important men grinned," Bob Morgan reported in his liner notes for the group's first
album.
"Within two weeks they had made their network television debut. The Brothers Four charmed everyone they met in New York."
"It was like in a movie," Bob Flick remembered. "To audition for agencies, we'd go into a famous folk club at two in the afternoon and there'd be three people, and you'd be expected to do your act on this bare stage. We went through all that."
After a lengthy but productive process of collaboration, the group's debut album, simply entitled
The Brothers Four
(Columbia CL-1402), emerged in late 1959. "The boys worked long and hard preparing this album," Morgan elaborated in his notes. "Hours were spent poring over new and old songs, listening to tapes, seeing writers, music publishers. During all this they never missed their daily rehearsals, trying new songs, polishing and rearranging the chosen ones. We're proud of these guys, and we're proud of this album."
Like the other emerging folk groups of the day, the Brothers Four drew heavily on traditional material, including in their album the venerable old ballad "The Damsel's Lament (I Never Will Marry"), the tall nautical tale of "The Eddystone Light", several calypsos, a rousing revival of Woody Guthrie's "Hard Travelin'", and "East Virginia", a virtual transcription of a classic arrangement by The Easy Riders.
Working creatively with the resources of their record label, the Brothers Four also showed an uncommon knack for incorporating fresh new material with a folk flavor. "Sama Kama Wacky Brown" a whimsical vignette about a boy who falls into a well, came from an improbable source: the writers of the Connie Francis teen hit "Lipstick On Your Collar". Among the best of the new material was the masterfully arranged and beautifully harmonized "Darlin', Won't You Wait", in which a young man implores his sweetheart to wait for him while he goes off to war. Most importantly, the album included a song that was to be the Brothers Four's first and biggest hit: a wistful love ballad called "Greenfields" written and recorded earlier by the Easy Riders.
The Brothers Four's first single was a calypso-flavored pop opus called "Chicka Mucka Hi Di (never give a thought to what's gonna become of you). The record, backed with the undeservedly neglected "Darlin', Won't You Wait", got some airplay in Seattle, but it was the Brothers Four's next single that catapulted them to stardom. "Greenfields" charted nationally in February 1960 and gradually climbed all the way to Number 2. "They were good at seeing trends," Bob Flick said of the Columbia executives, "and they said, "We better release a single of this", and we're sure glad they did."
The group's next album, a 1960 release called
(Columbia CL-1479), drew even more consistently on traditional folk material than did its predecessor. A few songs, like "The Fox and The Goose" and "Sally, Don't You Grieve" were hardly altered at all. On the other hand, old Appalachian songs like "Nine Pound Hammer" and "Bury Me Beneath The Willow" were creatively but tastefully rearranged in minor keys. In another nod to The Easy Riders, the Brothers Four took the 1956 hit "Marianne" to new heights of gusto and comic improvisation. It was this gusto, in fact, that characterized the entire album. Whether delivering a sentimental ballad like their next hit,
"My Tani”,
or an uptempo rouser, they consistently delivered their material with a degree of full-throated confidence that surpassed their first effort, and it was rewarded with a ride into the national Top Twenty.
By the end of 1960 the Brothers Four had scored yet another hit with a movie theme that had first been offered to the Kingston Trio and turned down on the grounds that it was "too commercial". "When the John Wayne movie The Alamo came out," Bob Flick explained, "and Columbia picked up the score, they suggested we record
"The Green Leaves of Summer.”
Although it didn't rise quite as high on the charts as "Greenfields", the reflective ballad was well suited to the Brothers Four's lyrical harmony and became their second biggest hit of all time.
With the success of these two records, the Brothers Four found themselves in high demand for appearances on TV variety shows and concert stages throughout America and beyond. "The whole pace of activity picked up," Bob Flick recalled, "because we were a folksinging entertainment act in the right place at the right time. There was the Kingstons and ourselves. Peter, Paul and Mary hadn't come into existence yet, so we had a couple years on the road pretty much nonstop. I can't imagine keeping up that schedule today."
The Brothers Four's next album,
BMOC
(Best Music On/Off Campus), emerged in early 1961. As its collegiate theme implies, it was another well performed collection of folk-based material whose diversity encompassed the well-known "Roving Gambler" and "St. James Infirmary", the minor-key spiritual "Well, Well, Well", the rousingly bluesy "My Little John Henry", "The Green Leaves of Summer", and the quintessential Northwest folk ballad, "The Old Settler's Song", otherwise known as "Acres of Clams". The group made uncommonly good use of vocal and instrumental dynamics on this album, arranging unison, two-part, and full four-part harmony to emphasize key points of a song's development. Clearly, the unmistakable Brothers Four sound had been established.
The follow-up release,
Roamin’
was, at least ostensibly, another concept album. The concept, illustrated by photos taken everywhere from Louisiana to Boston to Detroit to DC, was explained in Bob Morgan's liner notes. "Since their best-selling record "Greenfields", The Brothers Four have been roamin' the country, playing to capacity audiences from coast to coast. Their new program is a collection of songs of the free spirit, of the endless searchings of the wanderer. Continually on the move themselves, winning new friends and finding new songs, The Brothers Four understand both the joys and the longings of the traveler. These are some of the songs, expressing both moods, which have become their personal favorites."
Although the songs on this
album
didn't all fit this quintessential folk formula, a few, like Woody Guthrie's "Pastures of Plenty" and "This Land Is Your Land" were obvious choices. One of the album's finest moments was an Erie Canal song called "Low Bridge" which made good use of vocal contrast with two different soloists splitting the verses. Their rendition of "Abilene" brought the song to popular attention and probably inspired a later hit by
George Hamilton IV.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of this album was that it showed off the group's comic side to a greater degree than all its predecessors put together. The Brothers Four took boundless delight in twisting old folk ballads into sly spoofs on contemporary culture. Their "Variation On An Old English Theme", for example, turned "Greensleeves" into "Greenstamps". In their expert hands, "Frog Went A-courtin'" became the story of a hip frog who goes "to The Coconut Grove for the midnight show". Molly Mouse, the hat-check girl, rebuffs his advances with, "That's it, Clyde, better hit the road, You ain't no frog, you're a horny toad!" It was a daring piece of humor for the 1961 airwaves, but "Frogg" scored the group another hit.
(Note: This article will be continued in the next issue of HERITAGE MUSIC REVIEW.
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