Glenn Robertson Yarbrough (January 12, 1930 – August 11, 2016) was an American folk singer and guitarist. He was the lead singer (tenor) with the Limeliters from 1959 to 1963 and also had a prolific solo career. Yarbrough had a restlessness and dissatisfaction with the music industry which led him to question his priorities, later focusing on sailing and the setting up of a school for orphans.
Early life
Glenn Yarbrough was born in Milwaukee on 12 January 1930, later moving to New York where his parents were practicing social workers. However, because there were few jobs available during the Great Depression, his father traveled around the country from one job to another, and Yarbrough lived with his mother in New York City helping to support her as a paid boy soprano in the Choir of Men and Boys at Grace Church in Manhattan.
He was offered a scholarship at St. Paul's School, located at Brooklandville, Maryland, graduating in 1948. After a year travelling around the US, Canada and Mexico, he enrolled in college at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where his roommate was Jac Holzman, later the founder of Elektra Records. Yarbrough said that initially Holzman had wanted to call the label Elektra-Stratford Records, but "I suggested Elektra Records because it was a little shorter, and that's what we went with: Elektra Records".
When Woody Guthrie performed an impromptu performance for the roommates, Yarbrough became interested in folk music and learned the guitar. Holzman later recorded Here We Go Baby, (also known as Songs by Glenn Yarbrough) an early solo album by Yarbrough in 1957. Greg Adams noted that the album was "ahead of the game in terms of combining pop and folk music" and while not a success commercially [was] "an entertaining and fascinating artifact from the pre-dawn of the folk boom". The album was also described in the liner notes as a departure from the more traditional folk music on the Elektra label and a "showcase to highlight and display [Yarbrough's] virtuosity...undertaken for the sake of an unusual talent". Yarbrough was approached by Fred Hellerman and asked if Pete Seeger could play the banjo on some tracks, and this put Yarbrough in touch with the politics of the McCarthyism era of blacklists of musicians. Yarbrough felt at the time that having Seeger on the record was a risk, and expressed disappointment with his attitude and quality of work, asking Erik Darling to replace him.
Yarbrough served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, initially deciphering codes and later with the entertainment corps. After military service, he moved to South Dakota to help his father run a square dance barn and started appearing on local television shows. In the mid-1950s, Al Grossman, who ran the Gate of Horn, a small folk club in Chicago, booked Yarbrough for a two-week engagement. Here, he developed some of the most important relationships of his career with artists like Odetta and Shel Silverstein.
The Limeliters
By the late 1950s, Yarbrough had moved to Aspen, Colorado, and purchased a small nightclub called The Limelite. When Yarbrough was performing with Alex Hassilev at the Cosmo Alley coffeeshop in Hollywood in 1959 they impressed Lou Gottlieb, a jazz pianist who was working on arrangements for the Kingston Trio. Gottlieb suggested that the three of them work together. When they discovered that their voices blended well, they began playing on the folk circuit. "They had the uncanny knack of making three voices sound like six," wrote John Puccio in Sensible Sound, "and thanks to their velvet harmonies making a trio sound like a choir". They named themselves the Limeliters after the club owned by Yarbrough. A journalist described Yarbrough as possessing "one of the purest, most exquisite voices on the planet".
In 1960, The Limeliters recorded their first album on the Elektra label, and in 1961, their second album, Tonight: In Person, "reached No. 5 on the Billboard charts, where it stayed for 74 weeks". Between 1961 and 1963, the Limeliters "made appearances on television, sang on commercials and embarked on an exhausting touring schedule that saw them perform as many as 310 days out of each year." It was claimed that in 1963, the Limeliters "broke the Hungry I's all-time attendance record and the lines to get into the club, snaked all the way around the block".