Glenn Yarbrough, folk singer with the Limeliters . By Margalit Fox New
York Times . NEW YORK - Glenn Yarbrough, a folk singer who at
midcentury found fame and fortune with the popular trio the Limeliters
but who walked away from it all for a life at sea, died Thursday at his
daughter's home in Nashville of complications of dementia. He was 86.
Founded in 1959, the Limeliters - comprising Mr. Yarbrough on vocals
and guitar, Alex Hassilev on vocals and banjo, and Lou Gottlieb on
vocals and bass - was a contemporary folk group in the tradition of the
Kingston Trio. Known for their burnished tight harmonies, sophisticated
if nontraditional arrangements, and witty onstage banter, the
Limeliters were wildly successful. Amid the folk revival of the 1960s,
they appeared often on television and in live performance, sold records
by the hundreds of thousands, and became millionaires. By all critical
accounts, Mr. Yarbrough's silvery lyric tenor - a voice whose lightness
belied his stocky appearance - was the group's acoustic linchpin,
soaring memorably in traditional tunes including "John Henry" and
contemporary numbers like "Charlie, the Midnight Marauder," about a
hapless suburbanite who one night mistakenly enters the wrong house. In
1963, Mr. Yarbrough, restless, left the Limeliters, and the group
disbanded. An ardent sailor, he intended to spend the next decade at
sea but was persuaded by his record label, RCA Victor, to record solo
albums instead. He made a string of them, toured for some years as a
solo act, and had a hit single with "Baby the Rain Must Fall," the
title song of the 1965 film starring Steve McQueen and Lee Remick. In
the mid-1960s, Mr. Yarbrough began a collaboration with the poet and
songwriter Rod McKuen that resulted in several albums, among them "The
Lonely Things" and "Glenn Yarbrough Sings the Rod McKuen Songbook. But
for Mr. Yarbrough, success brought myriad discontents. "I did a show
last year at the Fairmont in San Francisco and there was a big cover
charge," he told the journalist David Lamb during this period. (Lamb
recounted the exchange in his 1993 book, "A Sense of Place: Listening
to Americans.") Mr. Yarbrough continued: "The only people who could
afford it were people already so embroiled in money that they're
already dead inside. I looked out at them and they're just sitting
there and they're not even living people anymore. It just doesn't give
me a good feeling working for those people. By the late 1960s, Mr.
Yarbrough had sold his Rolls-Royce, his Porsche, his Bentley, and his
two Ferraris along with, Lamb reported, his house in New Zealand, his
banana plantation in Jamaica, and an apartment building he owned in
Beverly Hills, Calif. With the proceeds, he established a school for
disadvantaged children, most of them African-American, in the mountains
outside Los Angeles. The school endured until the early 1970s, when it
closed for lack of funds. Mr. Yarbrough then rented his home in the
Hollywood Hills to comedian Marty Feldman and, with his second wife,
the former Annie Graves, and baby Holly, took to sea aboard the
Jubilee, the 57-foot sailboat he had helped build. He did not return
for the better part of five years. Throughout the '70s, '80s and '90s,
Mr. Yarbrough spent much of his time at sea, traversing many of the
world's oceans. He returned to land periodically, when his finances
were at ebb tide, appearing as a soloist, performing in Limeliters
reunion tours and making many records. Before moving to his daughter's
home six years ago, Mr. Yarbrough lived, during his dry-land periods,
on Lake Chapala, near Guadalajara, Mexico, where he grew fruit and
vegetables to give to indigent people.
