The Kingston Trio accounted for roughly 15 percent of Capitol Records’ sales, outsold Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, and sparked the American folk revival while wearing matching striped shirts and avoiding politics entirely. This episode begins in a Honolulu junior high school where Dave Guard and Bob Shane learned ukulele and absorbed Hawaiian slack key guitar, follows them to Stanford and Menlo College where Shane met Nick Reynolds, and explains how publicist Frank Werber discovered the act at a Redwood City beer garden called the Cracked Pot.

The hosts detail Werber’s boot camp of six-to-eight-hour daily rehearsals, scripted banter and uniforms, the 1957 Purple Onion residency that began when Phyllis Diller cancelled, producer Voyle Gilmore’s decision to record them acoustically, and the Salt Lake City radio play that turned Tom Dooley into a three-million-selling number one. They then weigh the purists’ charge that the trio were Tin Pan Alley sellouts, Frank Proffitt’s tearful reaction, the royalty and arrangement-copyright disputes behind Dave Guard’s 1961 exit, and the British Invasion that ended the run in 1967.

• How slack key tuning lets one guitarist walk a bass line and pick a melody at once
• Why the first Grammys in 1959 gave Tom Dooley a Country and Western award and then created a folk category the next year
• Four albums in the Billboard top 10 simultaneously in late 1959 and about $25 million in sales for Capitol by 1961
• The $300,000 buyout of Dave Guard, the arrival of John Stewart, and the final show at the hungry i in June 1967
• Lasting influence on the college concert circuit, Martin guitar sales, the Beach Boys’ striped-shirt look, and a 2010 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award