The Limeliters are an American folk music group, formed in July 1959 by Lou Gottlieb (bass violin/bass), Alex Hassilev (banjo/baritone), and Glenn Yarbrough (guitar/tenor).
[2] The group was active from 1959 until 1965, and then after a hiatus of sixteen years, Yarbrough, Hassilev, and Gottlieb reunited and began performing again as The Limeliters in reunion tours.
Later when he was working as an arranger for the Kingston Trio, Gottlieb was in the audience one night when Alex Hassilev and Glenn Yarbrough appeared on stage to sing a duet together at the Cosmo Alley Coffee Shop in Hollywood.
[2] After a short period of perfecting their act, they set off for the "hungry i" in San Francisco, which at the time was the California nerve center for the mushrooming contemporary folk movement.
Writing in the All Music Guide, Cary Ginell noted, "this album is a winner all the way and one of the shining examples of the best of the urban folk revival of the early '60s".
The group also toured extensively with a range of performers, including stand-up comic Mort Sahl and jazz singer Chris Connor, and made appearances on the TV show Hootenanny.
[2] Gottlieb and Hassilev continued the Limeliters but only as a recording act, recruiting former Gateway Singers tenor Ernie Sheldon[5] as Yarbrough's replacement.
Hassilev became a producer with his own recording studio and pressing plant, while Gottlieb headed the Morningstar Commune on a ranch he purchased near San Francisco.
[8] While on tour, the group came into the CBS television studio in Vancouver, "picked up instruments supplied for them by the network, spent perhaps 90 seconds tuning them...then, pure and simple, flawless, just as if someone had put a record on, out came There's a Meetin' Here Tonight".
[9] One review of a 1975 reunion concert noted that the audience, which appeared to be middle-aged old fans, gave "vigorous applause [to] the opening bars of the old hits", and concluded that while "nostalgia...was a little more prominent than vocal skills...the Limeliters still have a lot of the old magic".
"[15] Another music critic said that the group was unique because their individual vocal talents were never lost while singing together and Gottlieb as MC, [peppered] "the act with scholarly witticisms, wry asides, and zany non sequiturs.
McGarry observed in the Los Angeles Times that in 1985 the Limeliters were still the biggest names to appear in a series of Sunday night folk concerts called Bound for Glory.
However, there was a time when no "100-seat lounge, like the bar at the Sportsmen's Lodge, could afford to book the trio, one of the most popular groups in the heyday of folk music in the late 1950s and early '60s.
"[20] In 2015, Andy Corwin told the Kokomo Tribune that the vocal harmonies and sense of humor of the group had not changed and live performances were like a party to which the audience was invited.