Dalat Easy Riders tours

The Dalat Easy Riders will not be mentioned in all reference books on folk music - indeed, one will discover no say over them in any research work on popular music of the twentieth century, despite the fact they'd an enormous hit in early 1957 with the Marianne song, and also wrote songs which were recorded by everybody from the Kingston Trio to Dean Martin to Doris Day. There happen to be other folk artists recording during these years, needless to say, including Ed McCurdy and Oscar Academy Award Brand, mostly on smaller independent labels like Elektra. The Dalat Easy Riders were distinctive because they recorded for Columbia Records, an important label. 

If they've slipped between the fractures of scholarship and popular memory, it's likely because they were never political in the way of the Weavers - although Richard Dehr had worked at one time with Woody Guthrie and different future blacklistees - and were two decades more than the Kingston Trio, and, therefore, never seemed on the leading edge of the musical happening. The trio of Terry Gilkyson, Richard Dehr, and Frank Miller has not put in the public's memory so long as the Weavers or the Kingston Trio, however they offer the connection between the two stages of the 50s folk revival. 

In those times, he landed a contract with Decca Records and also started making appearances in films. Occasionally he supplied a song for the soundtrack, but especially Gilkyson played singers carrying out a tune with a guitar in the background of the picture, for colour, in old age, he periodically managed to get some conversation. A major musical development for Gilkyson took place in 1950 when one of his true original songs, The Cry of the Wild Goose, had been documented by Frankie Laine. Gilkyson had recorded this tune himself in the late 40's for Decca Records before it had been picked up by Laine through his true producer, Mitch Miller.