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 [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. 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.
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 pianist and arranger Lou Gottlieb, who was working at the time 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. In 1961, the trio had signed with RCA Victor for their second album, Tonight: In Person, which 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".
As a lyric tenor and guitarist, Yarbrough contributed to the success of the Limeliters as they performed "an extensive repertoire of traditional and contemporary songs...[touring]...extensively throughout the U.S...[and]...releasing nearly a dozen albums for RCA Victor". The Limeliters were known for their "burnished tight harmonies, sophisticated if nontraditional arrangements and witty onstage banter...[with]...Yarbrough's silvery tenor...the group's acoustic linchpin".
On December 12, 1962, a plane the Limeliters had chartered crashed in Utah. While everybody survived, Yarbrough had a head injury, was shaken by the experience, and began to "reassess his priorities". He did leave the Limeliters shortly thereafter, noting in an interview that he had lost interest in folk music and "got tired of the three chord songs...[and]...by that time people were beginning to write things like Rod McKuen's work".
As well as the folk-oriented 1957 solo record Here We Go, Baby, Yarbrough made other albums before joining the Limeliters. The sleeve notes of the 1957 record Come and Sit by My Side, noted that Yarbrough brought "folk music up to date, sings in a manner that modern listeners will understand and appreciate...[a]...novel, youthful approach to the old songs". In 1958 he made an album with Marilyn Child. Robert Sherman said "both of these vital, young performers [had] dramatic, highly personal styles, yet their voices and delivery are perfectly suited to each other".
After leaving the Limeliters, Yarbrough had intended to sail around the world, but while making plans for this, appeared as a guitar player in a November 1964 episode of Wagon Train. He did purchase a boat, but was persuaded by RCA Victor to postpone his trip and begin recording his first solo album, Time to Move On, released in 1964; the album was viewed by one reviewer as [setting] "the tone for the rest of his career: light acoustic arrangements, songs from an eclectic array of sources, and vibrato-laden vocals...falling somewhere between pop and folk". Jason Verlinde, a music journalist and co-founder of the Fretboard Journal compared Yarbrough's smooth tenor voice on this record to "the mighty seas that gave this legendary folksinger a case of wanderlust – occasionally rough but always beautiful and strong". "Baby the Rain Must Fall", the title song of the 1965 film of the same name made it to No. 12 on the singles chart, making it his biggest hit. An LP, also called Baby the Rain Must Fall, hit No. 35 on the albums chart.
In 1966, Yarbrough reflecting on his time with the Limeliters, said that it had all been "intellectual...[with]...Lou Gottlieb and Alex Hasseliv to sign autographs and be scintillating at after-show parties", but as a solo performer he needed to come to terms with more direct attention from his fans, even being regarded as a "sex symbol".
Yarbrough had a working relationship with Rod McKuen and by 1968 had recorded around 45 of his songs. He later recalled in an interview that he had no memory of the first McKuen song he recorded, but said that he was thanked by the balladeer and they became close friends.
Solo performances were generally well received. Writing in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1967 after a performance at the Texas Woman's University campus in Denton, Texas, Lani Presswood described Yarbrough's voice "as one of those rare, unmistakable things...[with]...a lyrical quality which makes you think of a spring breeze rippling a field of ankle-deep clover". Following a concert at Coe College, Iowa, in 1969, a reviewer described the performance as professional, concluding that "Glenn Yarbrough puts on a worthwhile show. The audience paid three dollars apiece and got about five dollars worth of entertainment." In September 1970, Yarbrough performed at the Saskatchewan Center of the Arts. He was said to be in full control, with an electric warmth, a "vibrancy that sweeps over the audience and envelopes it", even succeeding in doing material that involved audience participation, seen by the reviewer as "one of the riskiest tricks in show business".