Glenn Robertson Yarbrough was an American folk singer and guitarist. He was the lead singer with the Limeliters from 1959 to 1963. He also had a prolific solo career, recording on various labels.
Biography
Yarbrough was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Bruce Yarbrough and Elizabeth Yarbrough. He grew up in New York City where he lived with his mother. After graduating from high school at St. Paul’s School in Maryland, he attended St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland; there he roomed with Jac Holzman and began performing after he and Holzman attended a concert by Woody Guthrie. During the Korean War he served in the United States Army, first as a codebreaker then joined the entertainment corps performing in Korea and Japan. After military service, he moved to South Dakota, helped his father organize square dances, and started appearing on local television shows. By the mid-1950s, he started performing in clubs in Chicago, where he met club owner Albert Grossman and performers including Odetta and Shel Silverstein. One of Elektra Records' first artists, he was one of the first singers to record the traditional "The House of the Rising Sun". In the late 1950s, Yarbrough moved to Aspen, Colorado, and ran a club, the Limelite. There he formed a folk group with Alex Hassilev and Louis Gottlieb, naming it after the club.
The group's first album, Limeliters, was released in 1960 on Holzman's Elektra label. Yarbrough's lyric tenor voice was well-regarded. Yarbrough left the Limeliters for a solo career in the mid-1960s. His most popular single, and the one for which he is most well-known today is "Baby the Rain Must Fall", which entered the Cashbox chart on March 27, 1965 and reached #12 pop and #2 easy listening. There were several Limeliters reunion albums and tours, billed as Glenn Yarbrough and the Limeliters, from the early 1970s into the 1990s.
Later singing career
Yarbrough provided vocals for the Rankin/Bass Productions animated versions of The Hobbit singing songs such as "The Greatest Adventure", "The Road Goes Ever On" as well as The Return of the King singing "Frodo of the Nine Fingers" in addition to singing the title song in the 1966 holiday classic, The Christmas That Almost Wasn't. Yarborough was a featured vocalist on the PSA for the 1980 U.S. Census. Yarbrough also performed Utah Composer Michael McLean's Forgotten Carols, creating a CD of the show as well as taking it on the road to local audiences in the 1990s. In 2016, the song "Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven" was sampled for a song by Ice Cube, which can be heard in a trailer for the video game Mafia III. Glenn Yarbrough was also an accomplished sailor who owned and lived aboard three different sailboats: Armorel, all teak and still in operation; Jubilee, which Yarbrough helped build, taking three years; and the Brass Dolphin a Chinese junk design, and has, according to Yarbrough, sailed around the world except for the Indian Ocean.
Later life
Yarbrough lost his ability to sing due to complications from throat surgery at the age of 80. In his last year or so of life, he suffered from dementia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other health problems, and was cared for by his daughter Holly in Nashville, Tennessee. Holly recorded the album Annie Get Your Gun with her father in 1997. Yarbrough died from complications of dementia in Nashville, Tennessee at the age of 86.
