Michael The Highwaymen

The Highwaymen were an American 1960s "collegiate folk" group. The quintet's version of "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore", a 19th Century African-American work song, released in 1959 under the title "Michael," was a Billboard #1 hit in September 1961. The group scored another Top 20 hit in 1962 with a version of Lead Belly's "Cotton Fields". "Michael" sold over one million copies, achieving gold record status. The group originated at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where its members were undergraduates.
As a freshman at Wesleyan University in 1958, Dave Fisher, who in high school had sung in a doo-wop group called the Academics, joined with four other freshman – Bob Burnett, Steve Butts, Chan Daniels, and Steve Trott – to form the Highwaymen. Originally, they called themselves the Clansmen because they liked Irish and Scottish music. But they abandoned that name at the advice of their manager, Ken Greengrass and chose "the Highwaymen" which was based on a romantic narrative by English poet Alfred Noyes. Fisher, who would graduate in 1962 with the university's first degree in ethnomusicology, was the quintet's arranger and lead singer. Among the folk songs Fisher arranged for the Highwaymen was an African-American spiritual or work song "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore", which had been rediscovered in an 1867 collection of slave songs by Boston songfinder and teacher Tony Saletan in 1954, and released on LP in 1957 by both the Weavers and Bob Gibson. In 1959, United Artists released a recording of the Highwaymen's version under the abbreviated title of "Michael," which slowly gained popularity and eventually reached #1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart during the week of 4–11 September 1961, earning the quintet a gold record.

Later members were Gil Robbins (father of actor Tim Robbins), who joined in 1962 when Steve Trott entered Harvard Law School, and in 1991 guitarist/bassist Johann Helton.

The original group stopped performing in 1964 and the members, while remaining in touch, went their separate professional ways. One attended Harvard Business School, two attended Harvard Law School, and one attended graduate school at Columbia University, then proceeded into business, law, and academia. Fisher alone stayed in the music business, and with him as musical director, the "Highwaymen" continued with Renny Temple, Roy Connors, Mose Henry, and Alan Scharf. They recorded two albums, Stop! Look! & Listen and On a New Road, and performed concerts and appeared on many television variety shows. Temple, Connors, and Henry were previously in a popular Florida folk group called the Vikings Three. Alan Scharf had an earlier career as an actor which continued after the Fisher-led group disbanded.

In 1967, Dave Fisher moved to Hollywood where he composed and arranged music for films and television and worked as a studio singer and musician. He wrote more than a thousand songs, many of which have been used in movie and television productions. After serving in the Army Reserve, Burnett graduated from Harvard Law School in 1967 and "went on to a long career in law and banking." Chan Daniels studied acting for several years in New York and Hollywood and later graduated from Harvard Business School and became an executive for Capitol Records. Steve Butts received a Ph.D. in Chinese Politics from Columbia, and until retirement served as an academic administrator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Grinnell College, and Lawrence University. He also taught baroque music performance at the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music and statistics at Columbia. Steve Trott, after graduating from Harvard Law, became a prosecutor in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office.

The original Highwaymen, minus Daniels (who died in 1975), reunited in 1987 for a concert for their 25th college reunion. From that time until the death of Dave Fisher in 2010, the original band recorded several albums and performed a dozen or so concerts a year. Their studio album from this period, The Water Of Life A Celtic Collection (2004), was recorded and engineered by their bassist Johann Helton at JoTown Records in Boise, Idaho. Two additional CDs, in concert format, The Highwaymen in Concert, and When the Village Was Green, was released in 2002 and 2007.









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