Laugh Along With The Kirby Stone Four at the Playboy Club

Laugh Along With...was one of the last releases by the Kirby Stone Four. Special thanks to ARTISTdirect for information on, as the hip, non-existent kids call them, the KS4.

The Kirby Stone Four were one of those ubiquitous white vocal ensembles that seemed to pop up everywhere in the 1950's, drawing on several musical genres and melding them into an attractive pop sound -- they were more celebrated than most for their successes late in the decade and into the 1960's, and displayed a harder, more complex, and occasionally provocative edge than most of their rivals. Though never as conspicuously successful as, say, the Four Freshmen, the Kirby Stone Four generated a series of singles and a small number of albums that evoke their era about as well as those of the Four Freshmen, the Lettermen et al, with a very upbeat, swinging sound, not too far removed from the music that Frank Sinatra was making around the same time -- though Sinatra would never have stood still for their choice of certain novelty-type tunes.