From the Little Sandy Review Issue 11:

The year 1960 was, among other things, the Year of the Folk Boom.  Folk LPs and single sold across record counters like hotcakes; the Kingston Trio was on everybody’s Top Ten list; guitar and banjo sales soared; coffee houses sprang up like weeds in college area; everyone had Odetta’s new LP; and Jean Ritchie and John Lee Hooker even got on television.  Strange things were happening.  For the first time in history, American folk music became Big Business:  it was found that you could make a buck by knowing such old chestnuts as SKIP TO MY LOU or DOWN IN THE VALLEY.  (You could, in f act, make even more by writing them.)  Madison Avenue and Tin Pan Alley, taking stock of the situation, set about rewriting our American heritage 1960 style.  Most of our songs were debased beyond recognition, and folk (in most cases, folkum) albums flew off the presses so fast you literally needed an IBM machine to count them.  (Our estimate:  there were at least 300 different folk albums released in 1960.)  Any three people walking down the street became a folk group, and, chances were, had an LP out within a week.  The Weavers, Harry Belafonte, and Odetta were in and out of Carnegie Hall so often it made your head spin.  Mitch Miller (substitute any record company president) frantically grabbed four college kids, bought them two guitars and a banjo (in this case a TENOR banjo!), dressed them in Bermudas, and sent them off to Newport (where, of all things, they were accepted).  Teenagers swooned over Dave Guard and Bob Shane and called Nick Reynolds “cute.”

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