The season for recalling the folk music era of the late fifties and early sixties is upon us. Tribute concerts featuring the music of the sixties folk era groups continue to entertain audiences and the music that had us all clapping on the “front beat” in coffee houses and college concert halls continues to enjoy revivals, memorials, books, films.

The latest addition to the volumes, recordings, and remembrances of that era is a new book about the legendary Limeliters, a trio of folk singers that took the folk music world by storm in the late fifties and continued well on into the sixties. Among the remembrances and tributes, it would be hard to match the thoroughness and care that went into Richard Ginell’s “Makin’ A Joyful Noise: The (Slightly) Fabulous Limeliters.” Once I began reading, I became clearly convinced that the book had become a sincere labor of love for Ginell – an already established music critic and reviewer.

Ginell met the Limeliters in 1977 when he was in his twenties and became a lifelong fan instantly. Shortly after they met, the group became so impressed with the young journalist’s passion and talent, they commissioned him to write their story. As a journalist and friend, Richard followed each of these three immensely talented and colorful musicians through a lifetime of choices, successes, failures, and hysterical episodes. Each of the Limeliters members is painted in vivid color. Alex Hassilev, the cultured baritone and instrumental virtuoso born of Russian nobility, Glenn Yarbrough, the supremely gifted tenor who found his freedom in sailing solo the oceans of the world, and finally Lou Gottlieb, music PhD, creator, and later, owner and spiritual leader of the notorious hippie commune Morningstar Ranch in Northern California, and who regaled audiences with a wit and style matched by very few.

It is a complete and easy-to-read book, written by the hand of a schooled raconteur who clearly had a passion for the Limeliters and their music and brings their stories and history to life in its pages.

Makin’ A Joyful Noise: The (Slightly) Fabulous Limeliters by Richard Ginell can be purchased on Amazon and other places.

*Richard S. Ginell writes about music for the Los Angeles Times and is the West Coast regional editor for Classical Voice North America. He also contributes regularly to San Francisco Classical Voice and Musical America. In another life, he was chief music critic of the Los Angeles Daily News.

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Art Podell was a member of the legendary Greenwich Village folk group Art and Paul. He later became an original member of The New Christy Minstrels. He continues to write, perform, record, and hosts “Roots Music and Beyond,” a folk music radio show on KPFK FM Radio in Los Angeles. Click here for the Columns in FolkWorks that Art wrote over the years