Glenn Yarbrough

Glenn Robertson Yarbrough (January 12, 1930 – August 11, 2016) was an American folk singer and guitarist. He was the tenor lead singer of the Limeliters from 1959 to 1963 and also had a prolific solo career. Yarbrough's dissatisfaction with the music industry led him to question his priorities, and he later focused on sailing and setting up a school for orphans.

Glenn Yarbrough was born in Milwaukee on January 12, 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 in 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 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. However, Yarbrough was disappointed with Seeger's attitude and quality of work, leading him to replace Seeger on the record with Erik Darling, also formerly of The Weavers.

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, Albert Grossman, an impresario 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.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.