The Best of the Decca Years

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The Best of the Decca Years
BestofthedeccayearsKT.jpg
Greatest hits album by The Kingston Trio
Released June 2, 1998
Genre Folk
Label MCA
Producer Frank Werber
Todd Everett (reissue producer)
The Kingston Trio chronology
The Kingston Trio: The Guard Years
(1997) The Kingston Trio: The Guard Years1997
The Best of the Decca Years
(1998)
The Kingston Trio: The Stewart Years
(2000) The Kingston Trio: The Stewart Years2000

The Best of the Decca Years is a compilation of The Kingston Trio's recordings when the group was on the Decca Records label.

The Kingston Trio American folk and pop music group

The Kingston Trio is an American folk and pop music group that helped launch the folk revival of the late 1950s to late 1960s. The group started as a San Francisco Bay Area nightclub act with an original lineup of Dave Guard, Bob Shane, and Nick Reynolds. It rose to international popularity, fueled by unprecedented sales of LP records, and helped alter the direction of popular music in the U.S.

Decca Records US/British record label

Decca Records is a British record label established in 1929 by Edward Lewis. Its U.S. label was established in late 1934 by Lewis, along with American Decca's first president Jack Kapp and later American Decca president Milton Rackmil. In 1937, anticipating Nazi aggression leading to World War II, Lewis sold American Decca and the link between the UK and U.S. Decca labels was broken for several decades. The British label was renowned for its development of recording methods, while the American company developed the concept of cast albums in the musical genre. Both wings are now part of the Universal Music Group, which is owned by Vivendi, a media conglomerate headquartered in Paris, France. The US Decca label was the foundation company that evolved into UMG.

Contents

Reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
Allmusic Star full.svgStar full.svgStar full.svgStar full.svgStar empty.svg [1]

Writing for Allmusic, music critic Cub Koda wrote of the album; "Although painted as a quaint coffeehouse group from the hootenanny days of folk music's history, the Kingston Trio actually had pretty big ears for a wide variety of material, ranging from pop to obscure Broadway material, to songs from up-and-coming folk artists they had originally influenced... this collection shines a light on a part of the group's history usually ignored, and shows that much good music emerged during their final days." [1]

Track listing

  1. "Stay Awhile" (Nick Reynolds, Bob Shane, John Stewart) – 2:15
  2. "Long Time Blues" (Mason Williams) – 2:21
  3. "Love's Been Good to Me" (Rod McKuen) – 3:09
  4. "Poverty Hill" (Fred Hellerman, Fran Minkoff) – 3:24
  5. "My Ramblin' Boy" (Tom Paxton) – 3:46
  6. "Three Song" (Williams) – 2:10
  7. "I Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound" (Paxton) – 2:40
  8. "Rusting in the Rain" (McKuen) – 2:46
  9. "They Are Gone" (Williams) – 2:46
  10. "Lei Pakalana" (Samuel F. Omar) – 2:16
  11. "Children of the Morning" (Stewart) – 2:42
  12. "Hit and Run" (Stewart) – 2:16
  13. "Less of Me" (Glen Campbell) – 2:25
  14. "Lock All the Windows" (Stewart) – 3:17
  15. "Gonna Go Down the River" (Dallas Frazier, Buddy Mize) – 2:04
  16. "I'm Going Home" (Fred Geis) – 2:24

Personnel

Bob Shane American musician

Robert Castle Schoen, known professionally as Bob Shane, is an American singer and guitarist and, with Nick Reynolds' death in October 2008, the only surviving founding member of The Kingston Trio. In that capacity, Shane became a seminal figure in the revival of folk and other acoustic music as a popular art form in the U.S. in the late 1950s through the mid-1960s.

Nick Reynolds American singer

Nicholas Wells Reynolds was an American folk musician and recording artist. Reynolds was one of the founding members of The Kingston Trio, whose folk and folk-style material captured international attention during the late Fifties and early Sixties.

Production notes

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References

  1. 1 2 Koda, Cub. "The Best of the Decca Years > Review". Allmusic . Retrieved January 31, 2011.