Tom Dooley

November 1958

This arrangement by the Kingston Trio of a traditional American folk song seems pretty left-field for a chart topping single, but here it is, popular enough to interrupt Conway Twitty's #1 spot for one short week.

The Kingston Trio was part of the so-called "folk revival" in America, in which age-old traditional songs were brought back into the public consciousness. Reading about the group online, I'm realizing they were enormously popular around the turn of the decade, which is funny because time has mostly forgotten them. Hearing this, their most famous song, it's not hard to see why the kids these days aren't trading Kingston Trio mp3s. The music is extremely campy and unchallenging, which is incredible because the lyrics are quite dark - the story of a man about to be hanged for a brutal murder. It's definitely not your usual pop single fare for any decade, let alone the 50s, and there's huge dissonance in the fact that they're singing it like it's "You Are My Sunshine."

The folk revival would eventually culminate in Bob Dylan. Murder, trial, prison, and execution have always been popular topics in folk music, and Dylan wrote some of the best songs ever written on these topics. "I Shall Be Released" is about a wrongfully accused man in prison, "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" is about a man driven to a terrible crime, and "Seven Curses" (a little-known masterpiece imo, just don't pay attention to the corny fan video) deals with all the themes "Tom Dooley" does, but it goes even further and it's a far more powerful song.

Anyway, "Dooley" is apparently based on a true story, and the song was so popular that it inspired a movie, The Legend of Tom Dooley, which I'll reserve judgment on but I'm not gonna rush out to find a copy.

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