Reality in Academia

In nearly every U.S. jukebox is a pre-Civil War Negro spiritual called Michael, which probably originated among slaves who traveled by boat each day between the Georgia mainland and their quarters on the offshore isles.

Michael, row the boat ashore . . .

Sister, help to trim the sails . . .

The River Jordan is chilly and cold,

Chills the body but not the soul.

Released by United Artists last January, the song was recorded by five folk singers called the Highwaymen. It began to catch on wildly toward the end of the summer, reached the top of the charts, and has now sold more than 1,000,000 copies, bringing the Highwaymen cash-boxes full of unexpected gold. Most remarkably, however, the Highwaymen are actually college boys--all senior honor students at Connecticut's ivy-tinged Wesleyan University.

Relaxed Control. Now contemplating offers to perform for as much as $2,500 a night, the five boys spent their freshman, sophomore and junior years performing unofficially before preoccupied pool shooters in their fraternity-house basement. When one boy's father suggested that they contact talent agencies they auditioned for United Artists. As a result, the five Wesleyan boys will split more than $100,000 this year.

Singing in English. French. Hebrew, and Spanish, the group is a kind of Kingston Quintet, doing a spread of folk songs. American and foreign. All five play the guitar, and beyond that they diversify into a variety of instruments that includes five-string banjo, recorder, autoharp, maracas, a ten-string South American charango made from an armadillo shell, and a Nigerian talking drum. Their style is controlled and relaxed, with faultless rhythm, but minus Michael and United Artists, they could be any good college group.

In Touch. Each of them has other interests and is anything but a campus misfit with a guitar. Bob Burnett, 21, friendly, eager, misleadingly slight of build, is Wesleyan's pole-vault champion (his record: 12 ft. S in.), vice president of the student government, and an outstanding scholar. Son of a Boston investment broker who also runs a cemetery in Mystic, Conn., he is majoring in government and wants to be a lawyer. Last summer he went to Nigeria under a program called Operation Crossroads, showed Nigerians how to make cement blocks and helped them build a community center. Steve Trott, 21, tall, handsome, president of the fraternity (a local one called EQV), shoots golf in the low 705. Fluent in French and Spanish, he is the son of an executive in the overseas division of Procter & Gamble. A Mexican garbageman taught him how to play the guitar.

Chan Daniels, 21. president of Wesleyan's International Relations Club, is tall, urbane and serious, and has lived most of his life in Argentina, wrhere his father sells Jeeps. Stephen Butts, 20. is the son of the director of International Studies at Columbia University's Teachers College. Short and barrel-chested, he uses crutches as a result of childhood polio, has been chief engineer on the campus radio station and announcer of home football games. David Fisher, 21, short, unkempt, slightly aloof, is the group's musical arranger and the only Highwayman who is seriously interested in music. Son of a public school principal in New Haven, he wants to take a Ph.D. in musicology.

Last term the Highwaymen turned down an offer from Mort Sahl to go on tour with him, unwilling to interrupt their courses even temporarily. The group's folk singing, in Daniels' words, is just "a hobby in overdrive," but it does offer an advantage: "It puts academia in touch with reality."

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