For those looking to introduce some musical conflict into the holidays, Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart remains a great choice in its 15th anniversary – like it or not . Before Dylan really got started, an iconic group opened the door to mainstream folk success for Dylan and his contemporaries. And at the height of their popularity, they also released an unexpected Christmas album.
But instead of becoming a perennial classic, it seemed to foreshadow the approaching end for the group’s dominance at the peak of popular music. That album was The Kingston Trio’s ill-fated The Last Month of the Year from 1960. The ‘hottest act in show business’ The Kingston Trio are often remembered as a clean-cut, sanitised and goofy footnote in musical history.
Their matching striped shirts may be a difficult fashion choice to rehabilitate today, but the trio’s impact on popular music was explosive. Popular performances in 1957 San Francisco led quickly to their self-titled first album the following year. Reshaping folk music for a mainstream audience energised professional and amateur performers.
Critic Greil Marcus describes their breakthrough hit, 1958’s Tom Dooley , as having “the same effect on hearts and minds in 1958 that Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and Nevermind did in 1991”. By the time they released their Christmas album, they were the “ hottest act in show business ”. In the previous two years, they’d had five number one albums on the Billboard cha.