quality of work, asking Erik Darling to replace him. Yarbrough served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, initially deciphering codes and later with the entertainment corps. After military service, he moved to South Dakota, to help his father run a square dance barn, and started appearing on local television shows. In the mid-1950s, Al Grossman, who ran the Gate of Horn, a small folk club in Chicago, booked Yarbrough for a two-week engagement. Here, he developed some of the most important relationships of his career with artists like Odetta and Shel Silverstein. The Limeliters By the late 1950s, Yarbrough had moved to Aspen, Colorado and purchased a small nightclub called The Limelite. When Yarbrough was performing with Alex Hassilev at the Cosmo Alley coffeeshop in Hollywood in 1959 they impressed Lou Gottlieb, a jazz pianist who was working on arrangements for the Kingston Trio. Gottlieb suggested that the three of them work together and when they discovered that their voices blended well they began playing on the folk circuit. "They had the uncanny knack of making three voices sound like six," wrote John Puccio in Sensible Sound, "and thanks to their velvet harmonies making a trio sound like a choir." They named themselves the Limeliters after the club owned by Yarbrough. A journalist described Yarbrough as possessing "one of the purest, most exquisite voices on the planet." In 1960, The Limeliters recorded their first album on the Elektra label, and in 1961, their second album, Tonight: In Person, "reached No. 5 on the Billboard charts, where it stayed for 74 weeks." Between 1961 and 1963, the Limeliters "made appearances on television, sang on commercials and embarked on an exhausting touring schedule that saw them perform as many as 310 days out of each year." It was claimed that in 1963, the Limeliters "broke the Hungry I's all-time attendance record and the lines to get into the club, snaked all the way around the block." As a lyric tenor and guitarist, Yarbrough contributed to the success of the Limeliters as they performed "an extensive repertoire of traditional and contemporary songs...[touring]...extensively throughout the U.S...[and]...releasing nearly a dozen albums for RCA Victor." The Limeliters were known for their "burnished tight harmonies, sophisticated if nontraditional arrangements and witty onstage banter...[with]...Yarbrough's silvery tenor...the group's acoustic linchpin." On 12 December 1962, a plane the Limeliters had chartered crashed in Utah. While everybody survived, Yarbrough