Dave Guard & The Whiskeyhill Singers

Seeking fresh musical paths while also chafing at the Kingston Trio’s financial oversight, Dave Guard exited the group in 1961. Late that year he assembled Dave Guard & the Whiskeyhill Singers, recruiting David Wheat, who had previously served the Kingston Trio as an accompanist, along with Cyrus Faryar and Judy Henske. The lineup carried notable promise: Henske already sang blues-tinged folk with authority and would later issue several distinctive solo sets before joining her husband Jerry Yester in a duo and in the band Rosebud for well-regarded rock outings spanning the late 1960s and early 1970s. Faryar, for his part, would subsequently enter the Modern Folk Quartet, contribute to sessions for Linda Ronstadt and Fred Neil, narrate the Zodiac’s eccentric 1967 Elektra astrological concept album Cosmic Sounds, and release his own singer-songwriter material on Elektra in the early 1970s.

Henske and Faryar had yet to reach their artistic peak, however, and the Guard-led setting may have offered limited room for such growth. The ensemble’s only release, the self-titled album issued by Capitol in 1962, remained a standard commercial folk effort of the boom era, its repertoire stretching from a Woody Guthrie cover to broadly comic numbers. Henske’s commanding, blues-inflected voice on both harmonies and the occasional lead supplied the project’s clearest distinction, though most selections failed to highlight her gifts as fully as her later recordings would reveal. A second album was taped but stayed unreleased; the group did supply music for the soundtrack of How the West Was Won before disbanding in 1963. The 1962 Capitol LP has since become scarce, save for the track “The Bonnie Ship, The Diamond,” which appears on the Kingston Trio box set The Capitol Years.