The Weavers had been a long-established folk group in America, with traditional ties and a purist approach to their material. They might be considered to be the foundation stone on which the whole commercial boom of the fifties and sixties rested. But with their roots and orientation, there was almost a lining which separated them from the structure they came to “support.”
If there was to evolve a West Coast version of the eastern group, it was bound to be innovative, splashy and contemporary - as one would expect from anything to spring from California soil.
And those are exactly the qualities which characterized The Gateway Singers, the quartet which represented the vanguard of a movement that successfully swept across America during the next decade and a half.
Mentors to the Kingston Trio, among others, The Gateway Singers can be credited not only with popularizing folk music but also, taking it beyond the coffee houses and putting it on the concert stage - modifying, re-shaping, reworking folk material to make it more acceptable to contemporary ears.
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