Parenting & Family Quote by George Grove

There is something almost comically off about hearing a Victorian-era writer lionize the Kingston Trio: it reads like a confident authority speaking just a half-beat out of time. George Grove (1820-1900) cannot have said this, which is precisely why the quote is interesting as a cultural artifact. Its intent is to canonize a clean, consensus-friendly version of the 1960s folk boom by naming a single, palatable “origin” and blessing it with the language of inevitability: “led the way,” “started it all.” That’s how genres get laundered into history.

The subtext is about legitimacy. By insisting the music was “fresh and alive,” then immediately adding that “college kids loved it and their parents did, too,” the line frames folk not as protest or rupture but as intergenerational good taste. The Kingston Trio become a bridge product: adventurous enough for youth, safe enough for the living room. That’s a specific kind of praise, and it reveals a specific kind of anxiety - the fear that youth culture might be illegible or threatening unless it can be packaged as shared family experience.

Contextually, this is the mainstream narrative of folk revival distilled into a single sales pitch: erase the messy political roots, minimize Black musical lineage, and skip past rougher-edged contemporaries in favor of a group that translated “authenticity” into chart success. The quote doesn’t just remember the 1960s; it tries to domesticate them.