Monday Memories
Cousin Kirby, seated on floor, album cover, The Lincolns*
Kirby and I at a family reunion in 1993
Kirby Johnson and I were first cousins and about the same age (I think my grandparents had 24 grandchildren). Our families would gather at my grandmother's home in Mt. Morris on Sunday afternoons, and the little house would be full of cousins. I remember he had terrible asthma and I think he took up trumpet to help his breathing. We both attended the University of Illinois, where we graduated in 1961--he in music and I in Education. He was a member of the concert band and was in a music fraternity, so our paths rarely crossed on campus. While at Illinois he and some friends formed a folk singing group called "The Continentals," and then changed the name to "The Lincolns."
I was only vaguely aware of what they were doing, but I have one of their records (cover photo above). After college they headed for California and the "big time," touring the country with Donald O'Connor in 1962-63. Kirby by this time was playing many instruments and singing. Their album was the commercially viable pop/folk tunes so popular in the early 60s, with a number of the songs written by Rich Dehr, Frank Miller and Terry Gilkyson, of "Marianne" and "Memories are made of this" fame.
Kirby stopped to see me in Champaign in 1963 after the death of my son, but I didn't see him again for thirty years. His home was in California and after 1967 mine was in Ohio, and when we returned to Illinois to visit family, our paths didn't cross. I knew the group performed on TV and changed its name to The Wellingtons. So through the magic of Google and the internet I looked him up this week.
I discovered that he and his group (by then a trio) recorded the original Gilligan's Island Ballad. Rick Jarrard had left the group to become a producer. It was a rush job and no studios were open so it was actually recorded in someone's garage (according to one message board). Many sites still list them in the credits, but another said it was re-recorded the next season by a different group. According to
Rick and Darva's Gossip page, the Wellingtons appeared on one of the episodes of Gilligan's Island as a band called "The Mosquitos," a take off on the Beatles, having added Les Brown, Jr. to the group. Kirby performed regularly with The Wellingtons on Hollywood Palace, a popular, long-running Saturday night variety show of the mid-to-late 1960's often hosted by Bing Crosby. They also performed 64 times on
Shindig! according to a fan site.
I found Kirby's name as a performer, conductor and arranger on the albums of some big name performers like Carly Simon [No Secrets, 1972; Another Passenger, 1976], Harry Nilsson and Bonnie Raitt. I think he probably had a
fairly strong career in concert touring, TV and as a studio musician at least through the mid-1980s**. I never heard much after that, and didn't find many Google entries for later dates. I did find a 1986 film (music arranging) credit. It is difficult to tell, since many recordings are reissued and the credits run very long. We got together at a family reunion in 1993--in some ways he seemed the same sweet boy I knew as a child, but he was also world-weary. He died in 1999.
Most of the pop music web sites and bulletin boards say that Kirby became an attorney, but if he did, no one in our family ever knew about it. And some web sites say a group called the Wellingtons recorded Disney's "Ballad of Davy Crockett," but if so it wasn't for the TV series (
Mellomen one of whom was the voice of Tony the Tiger)--the guys in the Wellingtons wouldn't even have been out of high school in Illinois. Some sites say Wade became a producer, but I think it was Jarrard--but maybe they both did. The internet is fabulous, but there's a lot of misinformation too. And it's not much cleaner in the Wiki's.
*Members of The Lincolns were Kirby Johnson, Rick Jarrard, Ed Wade and George Patterson
**There is another musician also named Kirby Johnson, so more recent entries most likely belong to that person.
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