The Herald & Review is introducing a Battle of the Bands competition on its Web site.

Any band is eligible to enter. Bands will upload an MP3 to the site (we'll prescreen them, so watch the language) and can also upload photos and biographical data. We'll set a bracket, allow plenty of time for voting (depending on the number of entries, we expect each pairing to last about four weeks), and determine a winner by late spring.

The winning band will be profiled in the Herald & Review, and we may be able to offer a couple of other surprises as well.

But the real winners will be all the participants and all the voters. The bands get a chance to have greater exposure, and the people voting get a chance to hear more bands.

Bands interested in entering the contest should visit www.herald-review.com/battle.

ON ONE OF HIS early albums, Martin Mull made a great joke about a despised musical style.

"I wonder how many of you remember the great folk music scare of the '60s?" Mull asked his listeners. "Boys, that was close. That garbage almost caught on."

The piece started with an announcer saying, "Having trouble sleeping at night? Try the wonderful world of folk music!"

In spite of my appreciation for and enjoyment of folk music, that line always made me laugh.

But it's been a bad year for The Kingston Trio, one of the most successful acts, folk or otherwise, in the history of recorded music.

John Stewart, a six-year replacement member of the band, died this year, and last week, Nick Reynolds, a founding member of the trio, died at 75.

The Kingston Trio launched its recording career in 1958. They took an 1868 folk song called "Tom Dula," reworked it as "Tom Dooley" and had a No. 1 single, the only one of their career.

That launched a stretch of four years of Kingston Trio domination of the music scene.

Five of their first six albums reached No. 1 on the charts. The other peaked at No. 2. From July 1959 through October 1960, the Trio had four albums reach No. 1 and sat atop the charts for a total of 45 weeks. And that was in the midst of the original-cast recording of "The Sound of Music," still one of the most successful albums ever. At one point, the Trio had four albums in the top 10.

The band had a fascinating history. The original members were Dave Guard, Bob Shane and Reynolds. Guard, upset with the band's musical direction and the way finances were being handled, left. He was replaced by Stewart, and that version of the Trio worked for six more years.

(Stewart was better known to those of us who were teens in the 1970s as the guy who wrote "Daydream Believer" and had a hit single with "Gold.")

Guard died in 1991.

After a 1967 split, Shane continued performing Trio material with two other men, calling the group "The New Kingston Trio." By 1976, he'd reached an agreement with the other three to use the "Kingston Trio" name.

Reynolds returned to the group in 1988, and for the next 11 years, he and Shane were part of the touring edition of the Trio. While Reynolds retired from touring in 1999, for eight years he and Stewart would present a "Trio Fantasy Camp," where participants could become the third member of the Kingston Trio, performing with the duo.

The Trio continues as a performing unit, with none of its original members.

The Kingston Trio received its share of criticism in the 1960s. Some objected to their clean-cut appearance; others were concerned about the group plundering other cultures' music for watered-down tunes to sell to an American mass market. Some folk purists were irritated by the Trio's ability to deliver comic as well as serious tunes, and those purists also thought the group was bastardizing folk music by commercializing it. (Something the Trio shared with Bob Dylan.)

And, as is made clear from the Martin Mull remarks above, some people simply found folk music, Kingston Trio-style, boring. Any of those are valid arguments. (Heck, if any of them are yours, as far as you're concerned, they're ALL valid.)

However, The Kingston Trio also broadened the world for some of its listeners. If their music prompted you to check out original sources, or made you realize calypso music or Irish folk songs or African rhythms were something you could embrace rather than be frightened by, that's a fairly significant and ahead-of-its-time accomplishment.

timcain@herald-review.com|421-6908