ABSTRACT
The “Great Folk Scare,” as the folksinger and humorist Utah Phillips has dubbed it, was a strange and fertile period in American music. The six years following the Kingston Trio’s first hit brought the folk world a wave of mainstream attention and commercial success that alternately delighted and horrified the longtime acolytes and cognoscenti. As in any pop music boom, stars were born, soared, and died in record time: the Highwaymen, for example, put “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” at the top of the charts for two weeks in July 1961, then had four more records in the top one hundred, the last — the theme song from The Bird Man of Alcatraz— exactly one year later.
