The Kingston Trio accounted for roughly 15 percent of Capitol Records' sales, outsold Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, and sparked the American folk revival while wearing matching striped shirts and avoiding politics entirely. This episode begins in a Honolulu junior high school where Dave Guard and Bob Shane learned ukulele and absorbed Hawaiian slack key guitar, follows them to Stanford and Menlo College where Shane met Nick Reynolds, and explains how publicist Frank Werber discovered the act at a Redwood City beer garden called the Cracked Pot.

The hosts detail Werber's boot camp of six-to-eight-hour daily rehearsals, scripted banter and uniforms, the 1957 Purple Onion residency that began when Phyllis Diller cancelled, producer Voyle Gilmore's decision to record them acoustically, and the Salt Lake City radio play that turned Tom Dooley ...