Kingston Trio's Nick Reynolds, 75

Nick Reynolds, who as a college student grabbed a guitar, donned a broad-stripe, button-down shirt and quickly helped propel the 1950s folk-music revival to the top of the pop-music charts as a founding member of the Kingston Trio, died Wednesday in San Diego. He was 75.

Mr. Reynolds had been hospitalized with acute respiratory disease and a variety of other illnesses, son Josh Reynolds said Thursday.

The group's recording of the tragic 19th-century folk ballad "Tom Dooley" went to No. 1 in 1958 and earned Mr. Reynolds and his partners Dave Guard and Bob Shane a Grammy Award for best country-Western performance at the first Grammy ceremony.

In that inaugural year, the Grammys had no categories dedicated to folk music, which was booming on U.S. college campuses. The next year, the group's album "The Kingston Trio at Large" picked up a second Grammy for its members.

Mr. Reynolds typically handled the middle part of the trio's scintillating three-part harmonies, sometimes adding congas and other percussion accents.

Although the group's music generally shied away from the politicized content of such forebears as Woody Guthrie and the Weavers, its commercial breakthrough in the late '50s represented a clean-cut alternative to the sexualized rock 'n' roll of Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and others. The group also helped set the stage for such upcoming folk-rooted protest singers as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul & Mary.

The trio also charted hits with "The Tijuana Jail," "M.T.A." and Seeger's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" a protest song that became popular with anti-Vietnam war activists and that the group eventually sang on the White House lawn as President Johnson and his wife, Ladybird Johnson, looked on.

Nicholas Wells Reynolds was born July 27, 1933, in San Diego to Stewart Shirley Reynolds, a Navy captain, and Jane Keck Reynolds. The family, including sisters Barbara and Jane, often engaged in singalongs led by their father, a guitarist with an affinity for old folk songs.

It was in these sessions that Reynolds developed his facility with intricate vocal harmonies that became a Kingston Trio hallmark.

"Nobody could nail a harmony part like Nick," Shane once said. "He could hit it immediately, exactly where it needed to be, absolutely note perfect, all on the natch. Pure genius."

During a particularly dull accounting class at Menlo College near San Francisco, he noticed a student dead asleep and introduced himself to Bob Shane. Shane and Dave Guard knew each other from the time they'd played music together in Guard's native Hawaii, and when Guard decided to reconfigure his Kingston Quartet, he drafted Shane and Reynolds.

Mr. Reynolds left the group in 1967 after the British Invasion rendered its style antiquated in the minds of pop-music fans, and moved his family to Oregon, where he stayed until the 1980s.

In 1991 he joined Shane in a reconstituted version of the Kingston Trio. Guard, who had left the trio in 1961 to form his own group, died of cancer in 1991. He was replaced by singer-songwriter John Stewart, who went on to have a significant solo career.

Mr. Reynolds is survived by his wife, Leslie; two sons; two daughters; and two sisters.