Prologue from: Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927- 1961

This time tomorrow
Reckon where I'll be
In some lonesome valley
Hanging on a white oak tree

Hang down your head, Tom Dooley
Hang down your head and cry
Hang down your head, Tom Dooley
Poor boy, you're bound to die

Prince Souphan of Laos arrived at Lambert Field on November 30, 1959, to a proper St. Louis reception led by the deputy mayor and the head of the board of aldermen. The young prince was in town to attend a dinner sponsored by the Junior Chamber of Commerce honoring a thirty-two-year-old native St. Louisan who -- seven years after being nearly expelled from a local medical school -- was returning home as a hero, celebrated the world over for providing medicine and inspiration to Vietnamese refugees and Lao villagers. The prince told reporters assembled at the airport that Dr. Tom Dooley, better known to his grateful Lao admirers as Thanh Mo America ("Dr. America"), had made such a profound impact in Southeast Asia that communist radio broadcasts frantically denounced him as an American spy and regularly demanded his expulsion from Laos. [1]

The Jaycees had backed Dr. Dooley's work since 1956, when he had first traveled to Laos to build a clinic financed in part by royalties from Deliver Us from Evil, a best-selling chronicle of his central role in the U.S. Navy's autumn 1954 campaign to transplant Catholic North Vietnamese refugees to a newly created state in the South. Crawford King, a St. Louis Jaycee who ran his family's burial monument business, had volunteered to supervise the entertainment of the visiting dignitary during his brief stay in the Gateway to the West. The prince told King that he wanted to see some American dancing girls. [2]

On the evening of December 2, at a testimonial dinner at the Sheraton-Jefferson Hotel, the Jaycees presented Tom Dooley with a check for over $18,000. He excitedly told the crowd of fifteen hundred that the twin-engine Piper Apache aircraft to be purchased with their gift "will enable me to get our new hospital started in Ban Houei Sai [Laos] and to give a lot more of my time to new MEDICO projects in South Vietnam, Cambodia, and other places." MEDICO (Medical International Cooperation) was an expanding program cofounded by Dooley in 1958, devoted to providing nongovernmental, nonsectarian medical aid to people who, in the words of a former Dooley aide, "ain't got it so good," particularly those living in "developing nations" threatened by communism.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that "the slim, wiry young doctor" also received on that first evening in December a citation from the Reverend Paul Reinert, S.J., president of Saint Louis University, in recognition of "his personal devotion to the poor and suffering in a stricken land." Dooley was deeply touched by the honor, but he could not have been surprised to learn that Father Reinert -- a steady and often courageous presence at the university through four decades -- had just quelled a near insurrection fomented by his medical school faculty. While Dooley was by far the most celebrated alumnus of the school, especially outside of the medical profession, many of his former professors continued to dismiss him as a West End playboy who had taken five years to graduate 109th in a class of 116 (Dooley was surely the only member of the class whose ranking could be found in a CIA document). Tom had at least fulfilled the terms of a perhaps apocryphal bargain enshrined in campus folklore -- that in return for his diploma in 1953, he had promised the faculty never to practice medicine within the United States. [3]

After the banquet Prince Souphan and his Lao entourage were escorted to the conveniently titled Royal Suite of the elegant Sheraton-Jefferson. Though it was well after midnight, Dooley then turned to Crawford King and Bob Copenhaver, a publicist on loan from the Mutual of Omaha life insurance company, complaining that he was tired of the endless trail of fundraising and speech making; he wanted to "sneak away, and have a beer, and put my feet up." Suddenly he insisted that they all go out to the Chase Club in the city's West End, just down Lindell Boulevard from the Petit Pigalle (where he had occasionally played cocktail-hour piano during medical school) and other favorite haunts. Dooley wanted to meet the members of the Chase Club's enormously popular featured act, the Kingston Trio, young folksingers who would be certain to perform the song that had made them stars: "Tom Dooley." [4]

This death-row ballad -- with which the jungle doctor of Laos would be associated indissolubly -- was already by 1959 an almost "century-old Blue Ridge Mountains folk tune, originally titled `Tom Dula.'" The song was inspired by the trial and execution of a twenty-two-year-old veteran of Company K, Forty-second Regiment, North Carolina Infantry, who was convicted in October 1866 of murdering Laura Foster, "a poor girl, 21 years of age at the time of her death." The prosecution in the case convinced a jury that "a criminal intimacy had existed" between Dula and the deceased, as well as "between the prisoner and Ann Melton, a married woman" and the third party to the "fatal triangle." Ann Melton was apparently the last of the trio to contract syphilis; amid the ensuing acrimony Dula allegedly murdered Laura Foster. Melton was similarly charged, but, despite self-incriminating remarks she had made about her part in the killing, she was acquitted when, on the eve of his hanging in 1868, Dula declared himself solely responsible for the deed. [5]

At the conclusion of John Foster West's Lift Up Your Head, Tom Dooley, an exhaustive, luridly detailed account of the case (Ann Melton, we learn, possessed "almost all the faults one woman could have"; in addition to being "temperamental, demanding, and aggressive," this uneducated rural lady "was also lazy, with no interest in household duties"), the author declared in a somber anticlimax that "however cruel and demoralized Tom Dula might have been, however distasteful his lifestyle, whether or not he actually murdered Laura Foster or conspired in her murder," he should never have been charged in the first place. Among other procedural errors attending his arrest and confinement, explained West, the state failed to produce a murder victim during the first six weeks of Dula's incarceration. [6]

The origins of the ballad of Tom Dula are shrouded in a fog at least as thick as that beclouding the circumstances of its inspiration. Though the trial and execution were covered by the New York Herald, it is far from certain that Dula "made himself up a ballad" en route to the hanging ground "and sang it in his sour baritone, playing the tune over on his fiddle between every verse," as was claimed by the renowned folk musicologists John A. and Alan Lomax. There is general agreement, however, that the tune "lived on among the people of the Great Smokies as a ballad epitaph of a bitter returned veteran of the Civil War." According to folk musicologist Robert Cantwell, the song "entered tradition in Tennessee and North Carolina, where in 1938 an ingenuous young mountaineer from Pick Britches Valley, North Carolina, Frank Proffitt, sang it for a folksinger-collector named Frank Warner." Warner in turn provided Alan Lomax with a version of the song for inclusion in his influential anthology, Folk Song USA. In 1957 the Kingston Trio -- who had progressed from entertaining fraternity and beer hall audiences in northern California to a lengthy gig at the Purple Onion nightclub in San Francisco -- heard a singer audition for the club with a rendition of a tune now entitled "Tom Dooley." While the Lomaxes reported that "since Dooley sings much more easily than Dula, that's the way the song has come to us from that flavorsome North Carolina singer, Frank Warner," John Foster West insisted that the name was always pronounced "Dooley" in "the old ballad." [7]

The trio decided to record the song for its first album with Capitol Records; in July 1958 disc jockeys Bill Terry and Paul Colburn of KLUB radio in Salt Lake City found themselves spinning the platter incessantly and quickly touted it to friends in other markets. Capitol responded by releasing "Tom Dooley" as a single: it hit the Billboard Top Ten Singles chart in October and remained there for four months, eventually selling more than three million copies. By the time the group arrived in St. Louis at the end of November 1959, a new recording, "Here We Go Again," was poised to become "one of four Kingston Trio albums in Billboard's Top Ten for the week of December 7, 1959," an accomplishment "surpassed only by the Beatles in 1964." [8]

Following their last set at the Chase Club in the early morning hours of December 3, the members of the trio were introduced to the "real" Tom Dooley, who quickly enticed them in his unique fashion to haul their equipment to the Sheraton-Jefferson and favor Prince Souphan with a jam session. A star in his own right, Dooley was also about to hit some impressive charts. When the Gallup Poll's annual Christmastime ranking of the "most admired" men in the world was released several weeks later, Dooley's name occupied seventh place, just below such towering figures as Winston Churchill, Pope John XXIII, and Dooley's official idol and fellow jungle doctor, Albert Schweitzer. But Tom did not need to await the results of a popularity contest to arouse a celebration. He had just completed a grueling, two-month-long fundraising junket that swept through thirty-seven cities, even as he recuperated from radical surgery for the removal of a malignant melanoma on his chest. Bob Shane, who along with Dave Guard and Nick Reynolds comprised the Kingston Trio, noticed the young physician's difficulty in shaking hands and assumed it was caused by the loss of musculature in Dooley's right side. A bottle of Whyte & MacKay scotch was quickly produced; as dawn broke vigorous handshakes were exchanged all around. [9]

It had been quite a night. The trio performed from their eclectic repertoire of calypso, folk songs, and cowboy music, shifting gears at three in the morning to croon a rendition of "Scarlet Ribbons" over the telephone to Dooley's pregnant sister-in-law in Detroit. Dr. Tom taught the band the lyrics to his mission's new theme song, "I Was a Cooley for Dooley," an uplifting version of the trio's smash hit, while the prince -- clad in pajamas and bedroom slippers -- kept time on an overturned wastebasket. During two days and nights in St. Louis, not only had the youthful scion obtained the G-string of an authentic burlesque queen (the headliner at downtown's Grand Burlesque was "Kalura, the Puerto Rican Bombshell," supported by "Johnny D'Arco, the Singing Buffoon") and later ceremonially presented it to Dooley, but he had sat in with one of the most popular singing groups in the Free World. Dooley told Copenhaver to remind him "to drop a hint to the prince that he ought to do something for the Kingston Trio. He might send them an elephant or something." [10]

The easy banter and instantaneous camaraderie between Dooley and the members of the trio, young American celebrities all, seemed so natural that no one present in the Royal Suite that evening was likely to have imagined he was witnessing a special moment, the kind that proves the world does truly change over time. Sainthood and show business had commingled in a wholly new fashion. On that swinging night in the heartland, Tom Dooley, who had begun his ascent as a Catholic folk hero, confirmed his "crossover" status as a transcendent American youth-culture icon. The Kingston Trio, for their part, represented a new musical and cultural hybrid: folksong-crooning pop idols who had liberated the genre from its confinement in left-wing and "purist" enclaves. Drawn together by the unlikely intercession of a song, the piano-playing jungle doctor and the self-styled, deceptively sophisticated young musicians were forged at that moment into a kind of celebrity juggernaut capable of gleefully subverting the conventions of medical, musical, and spiritual "authenticity." In the freshness of their complementarity, they even hinted at new versions of American identity yet to emerge.

The meeting had even been eerily prefigured in March 1959, when the members of the Kingston Trio narrowly escaped injury after their six-passenger Beechcraft crash-landed in an Indiana field. They had been en route to a concert engagement at Tom Dooley's undergraduate alma mater, the University of Notre Dame. Just weeks after Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. Richardson (the Big Bopper) had died in an Iowa cornfield, the Kingston Trio not only survived a crash but immediately made their way to the Notre Dame fieldhouse for the scheduled concert. As Dave Guard recalled: "Here we'd gone from nearly being killed to getting the greatest audience reception we'd ever experienced. We talked out onstage and the cheering was just deafening. We announced to the crowd that the only reason we were alive was because we were playing Notre Dame on a Friday." At the university Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., a visionary leader as well as Dooley's friend and admirer, was in the midst of creating a modern yet fully Catholic institution fit to tackle a rapidly changing world. Yet not even the "new" Notre Dame would have welcomed the appearance of a typical 1950s folk group such as the Weavers, tainted as they were by association with leftist causes. In contrast, the modishly apolitical Kingston Trio, though unchurched, fully embodied both the breezy "collegiate good time ethic" and the lighthearted idealism percolating on a wide variety of campuses in the twilight of the Eisenhower era. [11]

The synchronicity of the Kingston Trio's hit song and Dooley's rise to stardom occurred less than one year before the election of John F. Kennedy, America's first Roman Catholic president. Tom Dooley bequeathed his most ardent constituency to the young politician he knew and admired. In many ways Dooley served as a bridge between the grim Catholic cultural politics of the McCarthy era and the tremulous euphoria witnessed by the end of the 1950s. If Philip Rieff was correct in arguing that "as cultures change, so do the modal types of personality that are their bearers," Dooley was without peer in leading his subcultural community into the blinding glare of late modernity. [12] The personal and historical forces that helped compose the mystery of Dr. Tom Dooley -- including the dark romance of his secret life as a "compromised" homosexual, beholden to elements of the U.S. intelligence community -- ranged far beyond the conventional limits of his religious background and identity; in fact, Dooley came to view himself as the prophet of a postdenominational American spirituality. Yet all the roles of his life led ultimately to a common stage, where both his public and his intimate identities as a Catholic exacted their tribute.

Tom Dooley had grown up within the upper reaches of an extraordinarily insular St. Louis Catholic community (a columnist and product of that world noted that "newcomers to our city are surprised to find everyone is related"). [13] Secular popular culture was eschewed by Dooley's parents as well as by the Jesuits who instructed him at Saint Louis University High School. At Notre Dame in the mid-1940s he was urged to enlist in the titanic and possibly final clash between Christian civilization and godless communism; he would be "discovered" in Vietnam in 1954 while presenting impassioned lectures to sailors confused by the crucifixes found in the rafts of refugees from the North. Dooley's first book, Deliver Us from Evil (1956), perfectly captured the militant parochialism of his inheritance. By the time he dramatically resigned from the U.S. Navy in 1956 to return to Southeast Asia as a crusader armed only with love, faith, and pharmaceuticals (which he had administered in Vietnam almost as a surrogate Eucharist), Dooley had indelibly personified a Catholic patriotism that even the wariest of old-stock Americans could scarcely resist.

Yet if in 1956 it would have been absurd to liken Dooley's crosscultural appeal to that of irreverent young pop stars, by the end of 1959 critics of rock and roll who continually exalted him as a wholesome alternative to Elvis Presley had at least found the right church, if the wrong pew. Dooley himself enjoyed teaching "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" to children in Lao villages. The Kingston Trio, for their part, claimed roots far west of Elvis's American heartland, in Hawaii -- Tom Dooley's favorite halfway house -- where in 1947 Bob Shane and Dave Guard had met as students at Honolulu's Punahou School. Five years later they left the island for schools in California -- Guard to Stanford, and Shane to Menlo College, where he quickly befriended Nick Reynolds, the son of a naval officer. Together they made for a likable, fun-loving unit who tapped and then reshaped a new spirit redolent of collegiate life, the golden West, and velvety smooth pop music. Their name was designed to suggest Ivy League cockiness as well as the calypso rhythms made popular by Harry Belafonte, yet for all their casual charm the trio grappled with a lingering orthodoxy as demanding in its own way as the dogma of Dooley's Roman Catholic Church. Folk music purists -- the kind who later jeered the amplified Bob Dylan from the stage of the Newport Folk Festival -- disdained the trio's eclectic repertoire and teen-pleasing showiness, only further alienating them from the older generation of folk groups such as the Weavers; "Shane, Reynolds and Guard," wrote one observer, "never considered themselves folksingers, going more for the spirit of the genre than for the authenticity of it." [14]

While many of Dr. Tom Dooley's critics denied that he was a legitimate jungle doctor, he surely captured "the spirit of the genre" with a rare fervor. His affinity for the Kingston Trio oriented a new future he was charting for young Americans in the late 1950s, especially young Catholics. Their culture had been defined for a decade by its ferocious anticommunism: one of their fallen idols, Sen. Joe McCarthy, still evoked in many American liberals and pundits images of autocratic prelates with Romish designs on the republic of virtue. Tom Dooley won his fame saving the Catholics of North Vietnam from rapacious communists, but by 1956 he found himself working as a civilian among Lao villagers who practiced none of the religions he had ever heard of in St. Louis. During his speech at the Jaycees dinner three years later, Dooley turned to a prominent St. Louis Jesuit and less than half-jokingly remarked: "keep away from His Royal Highness, Prince Souphan, who is seated beside you tonight, because he is a good Buddhist, and he probably wants to remain that way." [15]

In urging his audience toward an appreciation of a world wider than parish boundaries, Dooley also provided a bridge from the darker impulses of secular youth culture (which had provoked near hysterical anxieties over violent comic books and surly actors portraying juvenile delinquents) toward a mystique of service to others that many observers found deeply compelling. The Kingston Trio members were kindred spirits in gently guiding their young listeners away from strictly escapist musical fare. As the "authentic" folk singer Will Holt explained, "The Kingston boys sing good folk music and manage to do it in a way that's readily acceptable to teenagers, as well as other age groups. They are `sincere' without being `serious'... the Kingston boys are also comforting to teenagers in another way: Those who buy Kingston records can assure themselves they are listening to a `better kind of music' than rock n' roll. The trio forms a bridge on which teenagers can safely escape from subteen music." [16]

Dooley's interest in young people reflected his mystical desire for a postsectarian future. His example broke down some of the walls that trapped Catholics in an outdated posture of resistance to global citizenship, just as the Kingston Trio turned the music of left-wing connoisseurs into everybody's music and liberated folk from its ongoing preoccupation with McCarthyism. Like Dooley, they were dismissed by elitists as middle-brow opportunists, yet they managed to forge, as he had, a protean audience that transcended the stagnant cultural politics of the era.

The neat symmetry of their respective vocations was confirmed by the phenomenon of "Tom Dooley." When the song was initially recorded, the trio had scant awareness of the jungle doctor of Laos and certainly had no intention of publicizing his cause through their music. At the same time, Dooley's most ardent Catholic disciples, discerning a sinister plot, "despised the song because of the association of names." The author of a Tom Dooley children's biography explained: "The Communists decided on a terrible way to `get even' with Dr. Tom. They would use a song and make him look foolish." But Dooley himself "insisted that it was good fun as well as good music, and he was sure that the song's popularity also made people think of him, and therefore in some way benefited MEDICO." [17]

The jam session at the Sheraton-Jefferson drew together figures on the leading edge of a sea change neither they nor their constituents could fully divine. In an issue devoted to "the explosive generation," Look magazine called the trio "Pied Pipers to the New Generation," while Dooley was often photographed romping with adoring Lao children or, on his visits to the United States, regaling hordes of collegiate acolytes. The boyish celebrities shared bonds of idealism and a dashing, slightly rakish superstardom: at Stanford Dave Guard "had earned a reputation as a sort of stubble-bearded prebeatnik," while Dooley occasionally jarred admirers with his offhand, "bohemian" pronouncements. [18]

Less discernible were the roles Dooley and the Kingston Trio played as intuitive if premature postmodernists. Their distinctive identities were constructed around a dizzying array of influences, rearranged at will to suit performative circumstances. The trio's music was played on pop, rhythm and blues, and country music radio stations ("Tom Dooley" earned them a Country and Western Grammy award for 1958; a "Folk" category was not established until a year later). The "Kingston Trio sound" was indebted to the "slack-key" Hawaiian guitar of Gabby Pahinui (Dave Guard called it "a hula beat with an oceanic feel") as well as to Burl Ives, Frank Sinatra (who considered Bob Shane's vocal turn on "Scotch and Soda" one of the truest performances ever captured on vinyl), the show tunes of Lerner and Loewe, and "Polynesian tribal musicians whose names have been lost to time." Bob Shane always insisted that versatility took precedence over concerns for musicianship or folk purity: "I would tell people that you should use an instrument for whatever it is that you want to use it for, and don't be embarrassed by it." [19]

Tom Dooley unabashedly trumpeted his mastery of modern advertising and public relations techniques, utilized for the greater glory of his mission. As he brashly replied to his critics: "If you're gonna be a humanitarian today you've gotta run it like a business. You've gotta have Madison Avenue, press relations, TV, radio." Yet after MEDICO was cut loose in 1959 by its original sponsor, the International Rescue Committee, Dooley's savvy handlers were replaced by woefully inexperienced aides, and the program depended entirely on his brilliant choreography of the roles demanded by his public: Catholic anticommunist, rakish Irishman, gentle healer, nature mystic, manic taskmaster, master propagandist. [20]

Dooley's self-presentation was especially dramatic in light of the traditional wariness with which many American Catholics viewed secular vehicles of mass communications. Critics of all stripes rarely missed an opportunity to contrast him with his putative mentor, Albert Schweitzer, who though no stranger to the art of public relations, presented a much more conventional image as a stately Christian physician-savior. The array of forces Dooley harnessed in the late 1950s traced a jaunty swath across a landscape in which the sacred and the secular, the image and the reality were dislodged from their customary spheres and grafted into the composite likeness of this "Madison Avenue Schweitzer."

Tom Dooley was always entranced by show business. As his tastes in music evolved -- from the classics and opera favored by members of St. Louis society, to a brief collegiate stint as a chorus boy in the supper club act of the noted chanteuse Hildegarde, to the folk-pop sounds of the Kingston Trio -- he drew closer to the heart of America, extending the immigrant journey of his grandfather's generation toward more elusive horizons. He cultivated a large and loyal following in Hawaii, at the midpoint between his homes in Laos and the American mainland. Students at Honolulu's exclusive Punahou School, along with Catholic schoolchildren, raised thousands of dollars for MEDICO. Photographs of Dooley at a 1960 cocktail party in Honolulu depict him in a mode of unusual relaxation; sporting a Hawaiian shirt and natty Italian boots, he looked as though he were preparing to audition for the Kingston Trio. It was on this visit that he saw the members of the group for the final time. On July 17, 1960, the group saluted him from the stage of the Waikiki Shell by performing "their song." [21]

The trio performed several benefit concerts for Dooley's work during 1960. That fall, as he suffered a recurrence of cancer, the group's original lineup collapsed amid disputes over financial and musical strategies. The trio also became embroiled in a futile legal battle over the arrangement rights to "Tom Dooley" that ominously foreshadowed the unseemly struggle soon to be fought by claimants to the "real" Tom Dooley's legacy. In 1961 twenty-one-year-old John Stewart replaced Dave Guard; a year later the group dedicated their album New Frontier to the volunteers of the Peace Corps, a program launched by President John F. Kennedy in part to keep Dooley's spirit alive. [22]

John Stewart was invited to join the Kingston Trio just a few months after Tom Dooley's death. A graduate of a Catholic high school in Pomona, California, he shared with Dooley a background that seemed to set him somewhat apart from the remaining original members of the group. Stewart's account of his initial attraction to the trio movingly captures the nature of their appeal; had Dooley been given to introspection he might have recognized yearnings of his own in Stewart's reflections:

Bobby [Shane] and Nick [Reynolds] were very organic musicians; there was nothing cerebral about their musicianship. It was totally natural, and that was a great part of the magic of the Trio; it was that thing, that natural energy, that made them connect with millions of people.... They were totally themselves. They enjoyed singing music and playing music; but it was not so much an obsession and an escape for them, as it was with me, because they had nothing to escape from. They were very comfortable with themselves and with the world. [23]

Tom Dooley worked feverishly throughout his life to present himself as a "natural." This desire had fateful consequences, for he met fellow Americans in Southeast Asia all too willing to aid in the careful sculpting of a public image for him, so long as it furthered aims of which Dooley had little knowledge and less understanding. In his frenzied quest for authority to define America for the people of Vietnam and Laos, Dooley reveled in his access to individuals "on the natch," as Nick Reynolds characterized the seemingly effortless poise of his bandmate Bob Shane. The Kingston Trio, Walt Disney films, and the Sears catalog provided the all-American mythology Dooley then served up to his patients in his role as high priest of international brotherhood. He loved reporting to his American audience that his Lao "kids" only learned to pronounce his name after hearing "Tom Dooley" played on a battery-operated record player. [24]

Although they spent but a few hours together, Dooley and the Kingston Trio remain joined in popular historical memory. Mention of the jungle doctor's name to many Americans born between 1920 and 1950 inevitably provokes the query, "Wasn't there a Kingston Trio song about him?" The manner in which the song came to be "about" the jungle doctor of Laos orients us toward some of the mysterious cultural undercurrents Dooley traversed in the late 1950s, as he grew from an undisciplined Irish American rake into a celebrity-saint. Though he was to jungle doctors what the Kingston Trio was to folk music, Dooley's practice in the show business of medicine was intimately connected to the very real and dangerous game of cold war intrigue being played on a world stage.

To many Americans of a certain age and religious upbringing -- who know Tom Dooley from the Kingston Trio -- the jungle doctor will forever evoke memories of a youthful romance with the mystique of self-sacrifice, embodied in the image of a charismatic man dying young. Many have testified that on hearing Dooley speak, they were overcome with a desire to spirit themselves to Laos and join his crusade. He usually resisted their entreaties; at times it almost seemed like Tom Dooley wished to experience in solitude the opening act of his nation's consuming romance with Southeast Asia.

Notes

1. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 1, 1959.

2. Interview with Crawford King, June 12, 1991.

3. James Monahan, ed., Before I Sleep... : The Last Days of Dr. Tom Dooley (New York: 1961); St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 3, 1959; interview with Reverend Paul Reinert, S.J., May 2, 1995; Dooley's medical school class rank is indicated in an internal memorandum from the CIA's Office of Security dated October 10, 1956. The document bears the heading "Synopsis" and the file number 147058; it was obtained from the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

4. Crawford King interview; Monahan, Before I Sleep, 38-40.

5. Fred Bronson, The Billboard Book of Number One Hits: The Inside Story behind the Top of the Charts (New York, 1985), 45; Roger Lax and Frederick Smith, eds., The Great Song Thesaurus (New York, 1989), 398; John Foster West, Lift Up Your Head, Tom Dooley (Asheboro, N.C., 1993), 9, 12, 43, 49.

6. West, Lift Up Your Head, 12-13, 56-57.

7. John A. and Alan Lomax, Folk Song, U.S.A. (New York, 1947), 285; Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 2-3; West, Lift Up Your Head, xvii; see also John Foster West, The Ballad of Tom Dula: The Documented Story behind the Murder of Laura Foster and the Trials and Execution of Tom Dula (Durham, N.C., 1977).

8. William J. Bush, "Kingston Trio," in Phil Hood, Artists of American Folk Music (New York, 1986), 61-62; Robin Callot and Paul Suratt, "Kingston Trio," liner notes, The Kingston Trio Collectors Series, Capitol C4-92710.

9. The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935-1971, vol. 3, 1954- 1971 (New York, 1972), 1647; telephone interview with Bob Shane, February 26, 1992.

10. Telephone interview with Gabrielle Dooley, October 12, 1992; "Peggy" [Agnes Dooley] to "Tess" [Teresa Gallagher], February 7, 1963, Box 10, Dooley Papers, UMSL; Monahan, Before I Sleep, 40.

11. Bush, "Kingston Trio," 64; Cash Box, March 12, 1960.

12. Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (New York, 1966), 2.

13. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 22, 1979.

14. Bush, "Kingston Trio," 60; Pete Seeger of the Weavers revealed his ambivalence over the success of the Kingston Trio in The Incompleat Folksinger (New York, 1972), 24: "The Weavers'... example encouraged first the Kingston Trio, and then hundreds of other young strummers, to become professional folk interpreters. Some saw fit to parody and belittle the country people whose lifework they were looting for the sake of a fast buck. At their best, though, some of the groups introduced a commercial public to music which ignored worn-out formulas and said something about real people's lives."

15. Monahan, Before I Sleep, 36. -

16. George B. Leonard, Jr., quoting Will Holt, in "Pied Pipers to the New Generation," Look, January 3, 1961, 60.

17. Lucille Selsor, Sincerely, Tom Dooley (New York, 1969), 78; Monahan, Before I Sleep, 39.

18. "Tin Pan Alley," Time, July 11, 1960, 56; Leonard, "Pied Pipers to the New Generations," 56-60.

19. Ben Blake, "The Kingston Trio," liner notes, The Kingston Trio: Special Double Play, Capitol C4-96748; Bush, "Kingston Trio," 61-63.

20. Jim Winters, "Tom Dooley: The Forgotten Hero," Notre Dame Magazine (May 1979): 11.

21. Honolulu Advertiser, July 15, 1960.

22. In announcing the formation of the Peace Corps, President Kennedy cited Dooley's "selfless example" as one of the inspirations for the program; see Gerald T. Rice, The Bold Experiment: JFK's Peace Corps (Notre Dame, Ind., 1985), 5.

23. The Cash Box, March 12, 1960; Bush, "Kingston Trio," 66.

24. Bush, "Kingston Trio," 65.


Last revised: March 06, 2000.