[6] 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 felt at the time that having Seeger on the record was a risk, and expressed disappointment with his attitude and quality of work, asking Erik Darling to replace him.

[8] After military service, he moved to South Dakota to help his father run a square dance barn and started appearing on local television shows.

When Yarbrough was performing with Alex Hassilev at the Cosmo Alley coffeeshop in Hollywood in 1959 they impressed Lou Gottlieb, a jazz pianist who was working on arrangements for the Kingston Trio.

[14] 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".

[17] He did leave the Limeliters that year, 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".

[20] 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.

[21] 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".

[17] 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".

By 1972, Yarbrough was voicing dissatisfaction with the entertainment industry,[30] later commenting that he never sang to meet people's expectations, had "mixed feelings about stardom" and saw money as "pain in the ass just to take care of.

[9] In 1980 Yarbrough introduced what one journalist described as "his new sound", with less upbeat ballads and more mellow tunes, due in part to a case of strep throat at the time.

Yarbrough explained the album was composed of "rock ballads", and while noting that his music at the time was commercial, he stressed it was more than just "old stuff" and definitely not nostalgia, as he "liked to move ahead".

Alex Hassilev said after the concert that the Limeliters had chosen some of their set to fit with the "mood of Yarbrough's", and included material that was gentle with less of a comic focus.

[36] The show involved Yarbrough doing both the narration and music, taking the role of a 2000-year-old man who tells the story "to help people open their hearts to the true significance of Christmas".

[24] He had originally planned to do a movie on sailing, an area of special interest to Yarbrough not just because of a personal sense of awe of "waves 40 to 50 feet above you in a storm", but also as it provided the opportunity to get away from being "bombarded...[as consumers]...by the media and the big corporations".

[31] One journalist said that Yarbrough's love of sailing reflected the fact that while he had been successful in the entertainment industry, "he saw through to the bottom of that illusory world, its temporary nature, its phoniness".

As a result of requests from promoters at the time for the Limeliters to re-form, Yarbrough joined them for a reunion concert at Chicago's Orchestra Hall to a sold-out audience in 1973.

In a preview of the programme, the Los Angeles Times described Yarbrough as an "accomplished seaman...[with]...his new boat, a 34-foot junk rig...designed for single-handed cruising".

The school which was said to have needed an annual budget of $250,000 to operate was described at Yarbrough as taking "a very radical approach to learning...to learn something about education and what helps the mind retain information"[42] After selling many of his expensive possessions including cars, a house in New Zealand and a banana plantation in Jamaica, Yarbrough eventually opened a school for disadvantaged youth in Los Angeles but it ran out of money and had to be closed down in the early 1970s.