"...here's how we worked. The Trio would go on the road and I (and others) would start collecting material for the next album. When they got back, the various collaborations would take place and the songs everybody liked would find their way to the studio. A lot of it was highly innovative, but a lot of it was revision and adaption. A lot of the stuff was based on material that was in the public domain.
[Re: "White Snows of Winter] So: Who's this Brahms guy? I wrote that. (ha ha) Actually, this was not a particularly original concept. "Stranger in Paradise" for example is from a classical piece and it was a big hit before. And there was a jazz vocal trio around at the time (Lambert/Hendrix/Ross) who put lyrics to the famous instrumentals of their genre. I had a choirboy background and a small taste for serious music and thought hey, if you can hum it, it's a song. So White Snows was one of maybe six or seven things we worked on during the Trio's break that summer. (1960? Gasp!)
We wrote the lyrics on a hot day at Bob's house in Tiburon -- putting it aside and coming back to it. Everybody else was in the pool. Bobby's idea was a Christmas love song. Mine was the aspect of Reunion... and the tune. We tried to put Brahms' name on the credit line but the record label and the publishers freaked. Brahms might have heirs.
We wrote a bunch of other things together. I think maybe seven or eight of them are on the various albums. I also wrote "Ally Ally Oxen Free" with Rod McKuen. [...and which the Trio also recorded.]
What AM I doing now? I ask myself that question several times a day. Still writing."
The Kingston Trio Website:
http://home.att.net/~kingstontrioplace/
