A SONG TO SING ALL OVER THIS LAND
page 2
But first, Grossman
had to watch his new trio. "We put together some material and
auditioned for Albert, and Albert liked it," said Travers. Then the
rehearsing started. "We worked solidly for seven months until we
started to perform," said Yarrow.
Early on, it was
decided to bring in an arranger/musical director. "When we first
started working together, we realized that we needed a musical director,"
Travers said. "We were just too different, all of us, and none of us
wrote music, although Peter read, and the way we were arranging songs were head
arrangements. You know, you just sit there and, 'What does
this sound like against that?' But we needed somebody who could write the
part down when we finally decided what the part was or give an occasional good
suggestion when we'd run out of trying to figure out how to solve
something."
"I had hoped
to get Bob DeCormier because he'd been my high school music teacher and he was
the musical director for Harry Belafonte. But Bob was busy, had more on
his plate than he could deal with, and he suggested Milt Okun. Milt
came and heard us and thought we were cute, but wasn't thoroughly convinced that
we had whatever it was. He suggested Freddie Hellerman of the Weavers, and
Freddie came and heard us sing and called up Milt and said-- it is purported--
'What are you trying to do? These kids can't do it.' So Milt came back as
a favor to Bob one more time, and he said to himself, 'Okay, I'll get them in
shape to do a concert, and I'm gonna walk away from this.' But you
know how things are, you work with people, you get to like them and the next
thing we knew .... So, he stuck with it, we stuck with it, and we worked
with Milt for the first decade from 1961, really, to 1970. Milt was a
wonderful co-worker. He never really arranged for us, but he was--
I don't know what you'd call-- he was the coach! More like a coach."
(In the second phase of their career together, from 1983 on, their musical
director has been Bob
DeCormier.)
It is possible that
someday listeners will get to hear what those early rehearsals sounded like.
"I was really into tape-recording and radio when I was in high school, and
when I went to Greenwich Village I brought a lot of my original sound
equipment", said Stookey. "So, Peter and Mary and I
recorded as test recordings, oh, probably a half dozen tunes. We never
took them beyond singing in the living room, but I've got them on a 7 1/2 tape,
and I'm waiting for the Biograph [i.e. the boxed set]!"
The group needed a
name. Grossman originally suggested "the Willows," but
then they hit upon the idea of adapting the line from from "I Was Born
10,000 Years Ago" about "Peter, Paul and Moses" to make
"Peter, Paul and Mary."
It was Paul's idea
to change his name from Noel to Paul," Travers told Robbie Wolliver,
"Peter, Paul and Mary sounded much more euphonic that Peter, Noel and Mary.
It wasn't because it had biblical overtones that we liked it. Paul's name
was Noel Paul Stookey, and while he was a student he had a little trouble with
the word Noel. So he was kind of glad to shed it. Later he went back to
it, but that's when he grew up."
Stookey denied that
becoming "Paul" was his idea. "It was Albert Grossman who
was the one that convinced me that I should take Paul on as a middle name,"
he said. But he added that the name had been valuable. "Think
about this," he said. "Symbolically, if the group had been the
Willows, I'm not sure that we would have felt a value to our individual
identities in the same way that being called Peter, Paul and Mary has encouraged
us."
In the fall of
1961, Peter, Paul and Mary finally were ready to play outside their apartments.
Mike Porco, owner of Folk City, told Robbie Wolliver that Yarrow was playing a
two-week engagement at the club as a a solo when Grossman approached him to book
the trio. Porco said he wouldn't pay any more than he was paying for
Yarrow, and Grossman agreed to add $20 to the fee himself.
"It wasn't
billed as Peter, Paul and Mary, because they were just trying out," Porco
told Wolliver. "They didn't know if they would stay together.
It was a rehearsal for them."
"First, I
would sing alone, then Noel would do comedy, and then the group would appear
together," said Yarrow, "because we only knew 12 songs!
It's true. And those songs were the songs of the first album."
At the end of two
weeks, Grossman offered Porco another two, even though he had lined up the rival
club the Bitter End to showcase the group. Porco, who had now headlined
Peter Yarrow four weeks running said thanks, but no thanks. Grossman still
owes me the 20 dollars," he told Wolliver.
Peter, Paul and
Mary moved on to The Bitter End, where they gradually built up a following.
Meanwhile, Grossman was looking for a record deal. Though New York now
contained several independent record labels-- Moses Asch's venerable
Folkways, Maynard Solomon's Vanguard, Jac Holzman's Elektra-- interested in
signing folk artists, Grossman wanted to sign his artists to major labels.
He had signed Odetta to RCA and his falling-out with Baez had occurred when he
tried to take her to Columbia. (She wound up in Vanguard.)
"Albert
Grossman had a vision of a more accessible form of folk entertainment,"
said Stookey. "He understood and valued the tradition of folk music,
but he saw no reason at all why it couldn't be available to more people.
He was wise beyond his years. Albert would not have settled for
Vanguard."
"We went to
RCA Victor first," said Travers, "and they said they didn't feel
we were polished enough to record yet. Then we went to Columbia, and
Columbia was interested, but they had an A&R man they wanted to give us who
came to the club we were working in with a song that he said was a guaranteed
hit. Now, I don't read music. So, I looked at the song, and it was a
lot of , you know, moon, June, walk by the beach, the waves, blah, blah, blah,
and I said, ' Well, what's the melody"' He said, 'Oh, it's a great
melody, it's to a traditional song. "Red Rosey Bush."' I looked at
him, and I said, 'Gee. Number one, "Red Rosey Bush" is a wonderful
song and does not need these inane sappy lyrics. Number two, if you
get somebody to record this song this way, you are looking down the barrel of a
big lawsuit because "Red Rosey Bush" is not a traditional song.
It was written by John Jacob Niles.' and I immediately said-- he was a very
good-looking fellow-- 'this nice, good-looking fellow is an idiot, and we
do not need this kind of help. I don't want somebody telling us what to
sing, especially when they're wrong."
Now, RCA had turned the group down, and the group had
turned Columbia down. Among the remaining majors, Decca had not
shown much interest in the folk boom since dropping the Weavers in the early
'50s (with the exception of Burl Ives, who was considered a traitor by many folk
enthusiasts for cooperating with the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities),
and Capitol, with the Kingstons, didn't need another folk trio. But there
was a fledgling label out on the West Coast called Warner Bros. Records, a
subsidiary of the movie studio, that had been struggling, but was
now under new management and had paid a chunk of money for the Everly Brothers the year before.
"Warner Bros.
Records was founded at 10:00 A.M. on March 19, 1958," wrote Timothy
White. (The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys, And
The Southern California Experience, New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1994) It's first couple of years were not successful ones.
"Headed by Jim
Conklin who had been president of Capitol and Columbia, the company tried
to become a full-line record firm overnight, with a big catalogue
representing too many kinds of music." wrote Steve Chapple and Reebee
Garofalo. (Rock 'N' Roll Is Here To Pay: The History And Politics Of The
Music Industry, Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1977) By 1961, when Mike
Maitland became it's president, the label, despite the success of Bob Newhart 's
comedy albums and the still-hot Everlys, was losing $3 million a year.
"The film company thought of closing down the record division," wrote
Chapple and Garofalo, "but decided that it would lose even more money in
unpaid bills owed by distributors."
The record
company's headquarters were adjacent to the studio in, as White put it,
"the vacant top floor (above the machine shop) of a two-story auxiliary
building at 3701 Warner Boulevard" in Burbank.
But "auxiliary
building' doesn't quite capture it. "They were housed in an old World
War II wooden-frame building across the lot from the Warner Bros. picture
company," said Travers. "You had to walk up the
stairs."
Even closer to the mark: "When
we first visited Warner Bros.," said Stookey, "they were still
in the Quonset huts that were out on the Warner Bros. movie lots. I mean,
they were really the orphaned kids of Warner Bros."
Grossman had a
strategy about how to make a start-up label 3,000 miles away work to his
advantage, but first he had to get the group signed, which is where Artie Mogull,
a publisher at M. Whitmark & Sons (part of Music Publishers Holding
Corporation, later renamed Warner Bros. Music) who served as Warner's East
Coast representative, came in.
Stookey told the
story: "Mike Maitland called and said, 'I've been told [by Grossman]
that there's a folk act appearing at the Bitter End. We're thinking of
signing them. Would you go down and check them out?' And Artie said,
'Oh, absolutely.' Well, he didn't go. Mike called the next day and
said, 'Artie, so what did you think?' 'Oh, Mike, geez, I'm terribly
sorry, I got hung up late in meetings,' and he did a quick tap dance, and he
managed to extricate [himself], said, 'But I'll get down there tonight and see
them.' Well, something came up, and he couldn't come down again. The
phone call came through the next day, and Maitland said, 'So, Artie, what did
you think of them?' and without missing a beat, he said, 'They're great!' So, at
least we got to first base. MAny times, that's what it takes."
"Albert made a
deal with them which was quite unique in the annals of record company
contracts," said Travers. "Basically, contracts then were three
albums, minimum of three albums they guaranteed, and a fairly healthy advance.
They didn't have any money. Neither did we, but..."
"So, Albert
said. 'Look. let's make an album. You pay for the album. We're not
going to record the album in California the way normal people do. We're
not going to let yo do the artwork, we're going to send it to you.
We'll make the whole thing, We'll master it, everything, and you'll just
pay the bills. You don't have to give us an advance. You don't have
to sign us up. You're not obligated to do three albums. If the album
doesn't happen, it's a wash. You have minimal exposure. But if the
album does well, then this is what we're going to want,' and it was more
than anybody in the business got. Warners said, 'Sure.' So, we had a
great deal of control. We had absolute control over what went on the
album, absolute control of how it was mastered."
Peter, Paul and
Mary signed to Warner Bros. Records on January 29, 1962. According to
Robert Shelton, they received a $30,000 advance. "Peter, Paul
& Mary Ink WB Term Contract," read the headline in the February 3
issue of Billboard, the accompanying article noting that the trio,
currently appearing at the Blue Angel in New York, would release an LP to
coincide with their opening at the hungry i in San Francisco next month.
The next step was
an album. The trio discussed arrangements and repertoire among themselves
in a rigorous manner that would continue throughout their career.
"It's too bad you can't be a fly on the wall when we do an
arrangement," Travers said. "Sometimes there's a song in
which someone sounds really great 80 percent of the time singing melody and the
other percent is out of their range. So, someone else sings that part,
sings the melody. We switch leads. But the intellectual discussions
and arguments that ensue when dealing with a song are really what's so much fun
because we take it apart line by line. 'You believe that? I don't
believe that. I love the song, but I don't believe in that line. Can
we change that? Let's call the writer and ask him if we can change it.'
And sometimes, fools that they are, they say no, and then we don't do the
song."
"Every song
had to conform to the same criteria that it does today: It had to move us;
it had to be something that would excite us in some way or delight us; and
it had to resonate when we tried to sing it," Yarrow said.
"There were a couple of songs we've tried working on that just didn't
evolve properly. But mostly songs were floating around the Village anyhow
or Mary or I had known them for years. 'This Train,' I wrote every note of
that first arrangement. I just wrote it and came in and sang it. The
second song was 'The Cruel War.' Mary sang the melody, I just sang the
harmony on top. Mary and Noel just made up a lower harmony, and that was
it."
" Now, we
started to get much more involved in terms of doing melodic lines that are
contrapuntal to the lead line later. We started to think in terms of vocal
lines that would suspend the chord that was being sung and establishing musical
tension that way, although we dealt with it intuitively more than we did
analytically."
"We wanted to
sing songs of substance," said Stookey, 'and even if they were frothy or light, they should have a piquancy. We always felt like
something had to be worth doing. So, obviously, a gospel tune would
be worth doing, a song with a traditional background would be worth doing.
But when we got into the children's songs, we wanted them not just to be [sings]
'A,B,C,D,E,F,G,' but to have a character or some edifying or redeeming
factor. We weren't always successful, but many times we were, and over the
period of 35 years it has become almost a filter by which all songs must pass.
Now, it's our own personal problem [laughs], but it works very well for us
because it gives us a sense of continuity in our music. We assume other
people notice this or at least other people are aware that something is always a
bit-- it's not black and white with Peter, Paul and Mary, it's always got
a shade of something to it. And that also translates into the chords that
we choose to use from song to song. Taking 'It's Raining, It's Pouring'
["It's Raining," credited to Stookey], for instance, which
probably still is a very familiar phrase or refrain among kids, and then adding
the three nursery rhymes to it in music became also a point of departure."
"I guess what
I'm truly trying to say," Stookey continued, "is that much of what
appeared to be scripted or constructed really was happenstance by some very
talented people and became, not a blueprint, but a very comfortable means
of looking at the process of creating this music for recordings. So, if
you track all the albums, you'll see probably a gospel tune on almost every
one."
"You'll see a
children's song on almost every one. And you'll see Noel straining to
introduce major seventh chords and jazz chords and, you know, do zany stuff,
sound effects, crazy stuff, and really to a large extent I still contribute
that. I use the word 'contribute' in a very generous sense here. And
Peter, intense, political, causal, from the interpersonal, 'We are only one
river' to 'Light one candle' to Day is done.' And Mary, she always
kept the romance alive, whether it was 'Jet Plane' or 'The Water Is Wide' or
even the poignancy on the new album [Lifelines] of 'House Of The Rising Sun.'
She personalizes many times, and makes sure that that's part of the album.
"But these are not constructive, these are
just who we are and the creatures into which we have evolved."
You mean, asked the
author, it's "organic"? "It's definitely a compost!"
Stookey replied.
"The bottom
line," said Travers," is that I can go over almost every song, with
the exception of maybe one or two-- and I'd have to go through them, through the
whole catalog, to figure out which ones they were-- I would say 80 percent
of it stands up today. 'You take a stick of bamboo' ["Bamboo,"
by Dave Van Ronk] doesn't. That's the first one."
It worked in it's
time, said the author.
"Yeah, I'm
saying, it doesn't now. It doesn't hold up long-term. But all of these
songs, at the time, their lyric structure was something we believed in, or we
felt totally comfortable singing. I remember something with some surprise
in the second decade. 'Lemon Tree': Noel didn't want to song it anymore.
'Why?' we asked. He said, 'Because I don't believe in that
line anymore.' As a new-born Christian, he would not say, 'Don't put your faith
in love.' And we said, 'Oh, okay.' Because we would never, never ask
somebody to sing something they didn't believe. And we have a
one-veto vote. It's worked very well. Because we wouldn't want to do
that. Can you imagine getting on-stage and singing something that you
loathe?"
Another major
factor in polishing the material, again one that would continue throughout the
group's career, was that it was road-tested. Even after they had achieved
success, Peter, Paul and Mary constantly introduced new material on-stage prior
to recording. "We didn't go around recording stuff we hadn't
performed , with the exception of a couple of tunes," Travers said.
If you've had a
song in performance for 20 concerts, you know. You know whether it
works. By the third concert, you've fixed whatever didn't work, and then
by the tenth concert, it settles down and starts to have a life of it's own.
There are dynamic changes and interpretive things that happen where you realize
what you thought the song was about is still what the song is about, but that's
another aspect to it that you didn't see when you first started singing it.
I think that makes for a consistency, it means you can go in the studio and do
it over and over again relatively, and then all you're doing is picking the best
performance."
Also unlike many
other performers, Peter, Paul and Mary, at least at first, did not go into
the studio and make elaborate arrangements with lots of added instrumentation,
overdubbing and editing. "We were never monstrously big in taking a
line from one track and a line from another," said Travers.
"We did, but most the records we did were all live. We didn't
lay down ornate tracks and then sing to them. By and large, we always
tried to do live recording, where the three of us were in the same room singing
at each other, and that tended to make for a realer sound. And then, I
think, also, both Peter and Paul were very interested in the recording process,
which helps when when you're mastering and mixing, and they both would spend a
zillion hours in there. They're really good engineers, wonderful
engineers."
Yarrow noted that
the group was restricted by a relatively primitive three-track recording
process, a far cry from what is possible today. "But there is a
gift to the old way of recording," he said. "One thing that was
very important was that those were performances with the same kind of excitement
in the studio that you had in an actual performance before a live audience,
except of a different sort because you didn't have to get it [i.e., capture a
single, one-time-only performance]. "
"In the early
days with the three track recording what you would do is actually intercut the
takes, rather than what is done today, where you layer the recording so that you
put on this voice and then that voice, and then you overdub the strings and
whatever. You couldn't do that then. You could edit between takes
[with] a razor blade, and [recording engineer] Bill Schwartau was a genius
at that. Schwartau was a brilliant engineer and one of the people that taught
Phil Ramone. We used to make diagrams where we would go back and forth
between takes, and it was very interesting because it really did give you the
best of-- generally it was between two takes, where you were building up
and it really hit its stride [by] the middle of the take, and then you
would get the first half of the the next take working like crazy, and then you'd
lose that kind of crystalline sense of peak experience. So, you'd kind of
get the end of one and the beginning of the other, and then maybe, one verse
you'd go back and forth to the other, or a couple of lines, and if it worked, it
worked, if it didn't, you would deal with it a different way."
Yarrow also noted a
crucial mixing decision that affected the sound of Peter, Paul and Mary's
records.: "It was Albert that suggested that we not put the voices in
the center, which was the convention at the time, but put them hard right, hard
left and center ... and then we saw a different perspective on these tapes,
whereby Mary had her own channel and Noel had his own channel and I had my own
channel. Noel and I had our guitars with us on the channels, and the bass
was sometimes on one channel or another. But that meant that we actually
really separated the voices, and it gave you that spatial quality to the first
records where you could virtually walk inside the middle of it, turn off
my channel, listen to Noel's guitar and just learn the parts ... Noel and
I actually did the remix when we worked with Bill Schwartau. So, it was
our ears and our taste that was involved then."
As Travers noted,
Grossman also had arranged that the group would control the album packaging.
The cover photo, depicting the group posing onstage at the Bitter End before
it's brick wall, was taken by Bernard Cole. The words "Peter, Paul
and Mary" appeared in a striking, multi-colored script on the upper left.
"We hired a very young art director named Milt Glaser," said
Travers, "who was a student of the famous Henry Wolf, who was the graphic designer of that period. He was the guy who designed Show magazine, and Milt was his disciple. Of course, Milt is now hanging in the
Museum of Modern Art. Milt invented that original typeface that we used,
and he did all the graphics for the group, not just the album covers, but
everything from Christmas cards to stationary, and became a wonderful friend and
has remained a wonderful friend all of these years, and in fact this last album
cover [LifeLines] was his'"
"Albert
selected Milt Glaser as the art director," said Stookey, "which
was a real coup because in one deft swoop of his hand, Milt created a font
for Peter, Paul and Mary that became identified with the group for the next 20
years, and probably still is. At the same time, Milt handled all of the
album chores for the first decade. His design work was just amazing."
Finally,
there were the uncredited liner notes on the back cover, beginning with the
direct statement: "Peter, Paul and Mary sing folk music." In a
series of bold declarative sentences, the annotator emphasized the group's
unadorned quality. 'The Truth is on the record,' he wrote, with the
word "Truth" capitalized and in bold-face print.
The author
was "Albert's hidden partner, John Court, who was a man of letters,"
said Stookey. "John saw something in the group that we lived
out, I mean that was almost prophetic. He saw that in the synergy created
between these three people who were pulling individually, at the same time, it
was a very strange kind of-- and still is, really, for it to be working as well
as it is-- combination of individual requirements, needs, desires, and
ultimately individual compassion that made this group work and function and
bubble and flow in quick little rivulets to one direction or another, but always
ending up in a very moderate steady pulsed direction. And John gave it a
name. He called it truth, and he called it, away with ambiguity."
Peter, Paul and
Mary was released in March 1962. In addition to the songs previously
mentioned-- "This
Train," "Bamboo," "It's
Raining," "Cruel War" and "Lemon
Tree,"-- it contained
Stookey's "Early In The
Morning," Stookey and Yarrow's
"Sorrow" and "Autumn To
May," Hedy West's "500
Miles," the Reverend Gary Davis's "If I Had My
Way," Pete
Seeger and Lee Hays's "If I Had a Hammer" and Seeger's "Where
Have All The Flowers Gone" (which was the current single by the Kingston
Trio). Warner Bros. also released a single pairing "Lemon Tree"
with "Early In The Morning."
Both records hit
the charts for the week ending April 28. "Lemon Tree" reached
it's peak at #35 in the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending June
9. The album became a massive seller, finally hitting #1 for the first of seven
weeks for the week ending October 20. It would be certified gold on
December 10 and ultimately sell over two million copies, staying in the
charts 185 weeks, the 26th longest run of any album on the Billboard charts.
But it wasn't just that the album stayed on the charts for more than three and a
half years, it stayed high on the charts. On October 26, 1963, 19
months after its release, during its 79th week on the charts, it even
returned to #1. Spending 85 weeks in the top 10, 112 in the top 40, it
earned a ranking of #36 on a list of the top #1 albums of the '60s constructed
by chart researcher Joel Whitburn. (Joel Whitburn's Top Pop Albums 1955-1992,
Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin: Record Research, Inc., 1993)
This initial record success, said Stookey, "was by no
small part due to a man by the name of Don Graham. He was the Warner Bros.
record promoter on the west coast then. I don't think he understood folk
music traditionally, but he sure did know the contemporary music scene and
the angst of the disc jockeys, that they were basically nice guys looking to
have fun and play some really fun music. He tool us around to [radio
stations] and there was a fellow by the name of Buck Herring who was a disc
jockey at, I think it was, KSFO in San Francisco, who just started playing
'Lemon Tree.' He just fell in love with 'Lemon Tree.' which was a Will
Holt tune and not really-- how shall I say?-- mainstream to what Peter, Paul and
Mary were if you add up all the sounds, you know, if you try to find the median
ground. 'Lemon Tree' was really kind of nightclubby compared to what we
are, but nonetheless, Don took us there and squired us around San Francisco
during that time."
"At that time,
we were fifth on the bill at the hungry i, and folk music was just tickling at
the edges of people's consciousness. The Smothers Brothers were across the
street at the Purple Onion. The Kingstons, of course, had
established the hungry i as their home. So, to have another folk group
come in, and particularly, to have a slim, energy-filled, dynamic woman like
Mary Travers-- I mean, I've seen films and videos of us in retrospect, and I am
blown away by Mary's ambiance, you know? And she, in retrospect, all the
conversations I've ever heard her, all the interviews I've ever heard with her,
she says it was nervous energy. I mean she was just petrified on-stage.
But it really doesn't come off like that. It comes off like caged
intensity."
Part of Travers's
mystique was that, on Grossman's orders, she never spoke on-stage.
"She says that Albert spoke to her and said, 'I think that you will come
off a lot better if you just let the guys do the talking, that you'll retain an
aura of mystery,' ' said Stookey. "She makes some joke about it,
because now she talks all the time on-stage, as all of us do. We talk much
more than we should."
In July, Warner
Bros. followed the success of "Lemon Tree" by releasing "If I Had
A Hammer" as a single. This was a very different kind of song from
it's predecessor, and since it became so popular, it's worth exploring the
song's origins. Originally titled "The Hammer Song," it
was written in 1949 by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, prior to the formation of the
Weavers, at a meeting of the radical publishing organization People's Songs.
The songwriters' intention with their stirring words and tune was to argue
against the growing anti-Communist crusade of the late 1940's: The
"warning" they wanted to "ring out" was a warning against
right-wing extremism, and the "love between all of my brothers" (as
the original lyric had it) carried explicit socialist implications. It was
first sung at a benefit for 11 Communist Party leaders prosecuted under the
Smith act.
The Weavers
recorded it on a single released by Harmony records in 1949. But the
song was so provocative that, despite its obvious quality, the group never
considered performing it or recording it after they signed to Decca and achieved
national success in 1950. But it was published on the cover of the first
issue of Sing Out! magazine (published by People's Artists, the successor
to People's Songs) in May 1950.
By 1962, though
remnants of the red-hunting of the 1950's remained, few seem to have known or
remembered the history of the song, which encountered no radio resistance.
The single peaked at #10 on the Hot 100 on October 13, selling 700,000 copies.
That was only the
beginning. "If I Had a Hammer" has gone on to become a
standard. "That the message of 'If I Had A Hammer' can be read in
many ways is evident from some of the requests for permission to use the
song," notes Doris Willens, "for a Save the Children Federation
public-service television spot; as the theme for a civic campaign to
modernize the government of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; for a National Film
Board of Canada documentary; as a campaign song for Kenneth Monfort,
running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate from the state of
Colorado.
"By
1973," Willens continued, "the song had so woven itself into the fabric of the nation that Senator Sam Ervin recorded it in his heavy southern
drawl, with stirring passages of 'America The Beautiful' as background." (Lonesome
Traveler: The Life of Lee Hays, New York: W.W. Norton 7 Company, 1988)
"There is
unquestionably a trade-off between reaching a broad audience through the mass
media and the content or original meaning of a song," wrote Robbie
Lieberman. "The question is whether the trade-off is worth it.
Former People's Songsters disagree on the answer to this question-- there is no
simple or objective answer-- but most acknowledge that the commercial world
cannot be ignored. For example, there are 116 recorded versions of 'The
Hammer Song.' Does this mean the song has been particularly
effective in reaching people or that it has become meaningless because of its
commercial success?" ("My Song Is My Weapon";
People's Songs, American Communism, And The Politics Of Culture, 1930-50, Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989)
Such questions
cannot be answered easily. But the success of "If I Had A
Hammer" in early 1962 seems to have been both an indication of and an
encouragement to the decline of the red-baiting era, as well as an explicit
bridge between the popularity and political commitment of the Weavers and that
of Peter, Paul and Mary. Pete Seeger, whose indictment for contempt by the
notorious House Committee on UnAmerican Activities finally had been dismissed by
the U.S. Court of appeals in May, found that his version of the song harmonized
with the Peter, Paul and Mary arrangement: At his concerts he would sing the
original, and the audience could sing along with the new one.
Travers had a
similar experience later on. "I remember being in a political prison
in El Salvador in '83 and singing with a young teacher who was a prisoner,"
she said. "He accompanied me, and we sang, 'If I Had A Hammer' together.
Of course, we sang the Trini Lopez version! [Lopez had a #3 hit with the song in
1963.] But that was okay. A good song can be sung a lot of different
ways."
"If I Had A
Hammer" won Peter, Paul and Mary 1962 Grammy awards for Best Performance by
a Vocal Group and Best Folk Recording. They lost the Best New artist Award
to Robert Goulet.
In November, Warner
Bros. released Peter, Paul and Mary's third single, "Big Boat," drawn
from their upcoming second record album. The song, credited to
Stookey/Lane/Okun/Mezzetti, had a lively arrangement reminiscent of the group's
treatment of "If I Had My Way." But it failed to match the
success of their first two singles, getting to only #93 in the Hot 100.
Nevertheless, Peter, Paul and Mary's three chart singles during the year gave
them a ranking of sixth among the top debut artists on the Hot 100, according to
Joel Whitburn, (Joel Whitburn's Pop Singles Annual 1955-1990, Menomonee
Falls, Wisconsin: Record Research, Inc., 1991)
(Moving),
the second Peter, Paul and Mary album, was released during the first week of
1963. Like its predecessor, the album combined group originals with folk
standards like Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" (like
"If I Had A Hammer," a song with a radical protest origin that has
become a mainstream perennial). The same team of Yarrow, Stookey, Travers,
Grossman, Okun, Cole, Schwartau and Court (credited this time) was present,
along with a couple of new names from inside the family. The album's back
cover photograph was credited to Barry Feinstein, who was Travers's husband.
And seven of the 12 songs were credited as having been written or co-written by
Elaina Mezzetti. Who was she? "Elaina Mezzetti is my
sister," said Yarrow. "That was my way of giving her
income."
Simultaneous with the album's release came a second single
release, Mike Settle's "Settle Down (Goin' Down That
Highway)," a
lively performance that improved on the showing of "Big
Boat," getting
to #56. The LP broke onto the charts on January 19, when the debut
album was still at #3. As of February 2, Peter, Paul and Mary had two
albums in the top 10 at the same time, a situation that continued most weeks
until the fall. (Moving) peaked at #2 on March 30, eventually
staying on the charts 99 weeks.
Warners finally
found a hit single on the album on the third try. "Puff (The Magic
Dragon)" (the parentheses were used only on the 45), released in February,
entered the charts for the week ending March 16; it peaked at #2 on May
11, behind Little Peggy March's "I Will Follow Him." On Billboard's "Middle-Road Singles" (previously "Easy Listening ") chart
(where "Lemon Tree" had hit #12 and "Settle Down" #14),
"Puff" hit #1 for the first two weeks the same day. It
even hit #10 on the "Hot R&B Singles" chart, Peter, Paul and
Mary's only appearance on that list.
Needless to say,
"Puff" encountered no resistance at radio or from the commentators who
later seized upon its supposedly subversive drug message. Stookey laments
that this interpretation clings to the song, "no matter how many times we
try to put the story to rest." [Peter's
reply to the story]
"I think we
were three years beyond 'Puff (The Magic Dragon)'s' success," Stookey
recalled, when a certain newsmagazine decided to have some fun. "The Newsweek article was in fact the first mention of anything like that, and as I
understand it when one of the reporters was approached about it, he said
shamefacedly, 'We were all sitting around complaining about what bullshit it
was, this McCarthy scare about hidden lyrics. So, we decided that we would
come up with the most innocuous song that we could think of in this pool of
writers and say that it was purported to be [about drugs]." He said,
"We never thought for a minute that it would take hold.' And it's
still tearing at us."
On March 2, the
group's recording success earned them a feature article in Billboard in
which Ren Grevatt noted their recent "command performance" at the
White House and their upcoming tour of Europe in the fall. He quoted Peter
Yarrow describing the trio as "urban," but not "ethnic," and
he caught Yarrow's characteristic seriousness of purpose. "Movies
today have shown that the public is willing to be moved, not just
entertained," Yarrow told Grevatt. "It's the same way with folk
music. There's more of an experience to it than simply
entertainment."
On Saturday, April
6, 1963 ABC-TV broadcast the first show of it's new series Hootenanny between 8:30 pm and nine o'clock. Hosted by Jack Linkletter and taped
before a live audience at a different college campus each week, the series
reflected the enormous rise in popularity of folk music as represented by the
Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Rooftop Singers and others.
In late February,
however, Broadside magazine broke the story that the show was
perpetuating the blacklist, reporting that Joan Baez had been approached
to appear and had asked if Pete Seeger would be on the show. When told he
would not, she declined.
By the time of the
first show's airing, the story was a national scandal. Reviewing
that show in The New York Times on Monday, April 8, critic Jack
Gould wrote, "Television's belated recognition of interest in folk singing
... is accompanied by one disquieting note. Apparently Pete Seeger's
private political opinions continue to keep him off all network shows of folk
singers."
"Since he is
at liberty to appear on stages and can be heard at home on recordings, why
should TV prolong it's blacklist? Mr. Seeger's credential for TV is his
art, which is in order."
Peter, Paul and
Mary found out why Seeger was unwelcome when Hootenanny reportedly
offered them $25,000 to appear. "They wanted us very badly,"
said Travers. "They said, 'Please do the program,' and we said,
'Oh, we'd love to do the program with Pete Seeger.' And they said,
'No, we don't think so.' And we said, 'Well, we'll do it for free with
Pete Seeger.' And they said, 'No we don't think he has any college
appeal.' [laughs] And so we said, 'Thank you, but no thank
you.' We said, 'Obviously, you're still in the grip of the
blacklist.' 'Oh no, no, no, it's just we don't think he has any college
appeal,' And if it hadn't been so tragic, we would have really
laughed."
In September, ABC
tacitly admitted its real reason for banning Seeger when it informed him that if
he furnished a "sworn affidavit as to his past and present affiliations,'
it would consider booking him on Hootenanny. In other words,
"Are you now, or have you ever been ... ," precisely the
question that had led to Seeger's contempt citation from the UnAmerican
Activities Committee. Of course, he refused.
Hootenanny stayed on the air until September 12, 1964, without ever presenting the major
names in folk music. It would be several years until the Smothers Brothers
finally managed to break the blacklist on Pete Seeger, not long before
having their variety show canceled over censorship disputes. Peter, Paul
and Mary would appear on one of their final shows.
Meanwhile,
much had happened in the career of Bob Dylan since Noel Stookey advised Albert
Grossman to keep an eye on him in June 1961. Grossman had met Dylan at the
Gaslight that July. On September 29, Robert Shelton gave Dylan a
favorable write-up in The New York Times. On September 30, Dylan
met Columbia records A&R executive John Hammond at a Carolyn Hester
recording session. Hammond signed Dylan to Columbia on October 26.
On March 19, 1962, Columbia released Dylan's debut album, Bob Dylan,
to scant notice. On April 16, the day of it's completion, Dylan's
song "Blowin' In The Wind" was performed by Gil Turner at Folk City.
It was published on the front page of the late May issue of Broadside.
By June, Albert
Grossman had taken over as Dylan's manager, buying out Roy Silver, a
friend who had been booking the singer. According to Shelton, half of the
$10,000 Grossman paid Silver for Dylan was provided by Peter, Paul and
Mary, giving them a financial stake in his success. "From 1962
on," Shelton wrote, "there were rumors that Peter,
Paul and Mary had a part interest in Dylan's future, but the trio's constant
denials tended to make the arrangement seem sinister. All it meant was
that the trio was backing privately what they said publicly: They believed Dylan
had strong potential."
"Blowin' In
The Wind" confirmed that potential. Like "If I Had A
Hammer" and "This Land Is Your Land," it is a song that has
passed into the mass consciousness minus the context and specific meaning with
which it was written. But no one who heard it in the early 1960's
could have missed it's subject: "Blowin' In The Wind" is an
anthem about civil rights (and to a lesser extent, disarmament). In
its three verses containing nine rhetorical queries. The song asked the
questions African-Americans and their Caucasian sympathizers had been asking for
a decade. Lines like "How many roads must a man walk down before he's
called a man?" (in the Broadside version; Dylan's recorded
version went " ... before you call him a man?" while
Peter, Paul and Mary would sing "before they call him a man") and
"How many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be
free?" addressed the civil rights movement's quest for dignity and equal
treatment in the South, and Dylan also cited the white majority that
feigned ignorance of the oppression the black minority suffered:
"How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't
see? ... How many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry?"
The song's chorus,
"The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, the answer is blowin; in
the wind," poetically spoke to the uncertain chances of the
movement's success and the duration of the struggle at a time when a timid and
distracted, if sympathetic Kennedy administration in Washington was
dragging it's feet and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his followers and
associates seemed to be fighting a city-by-city, day-by-day war for equality.
"Blowin' In The Wind" crystallized the feelings of blacks and whites
in the early 1960's, and long after it's specific inspirations have faded it
remains stirring as a broader philosophical statement.
On July 9, 1962,
Dylan recorded "Blowin' In The Wind" for Columbia, though it
would not be released for almost 11 months. Grossman, who had
arranged a song publishing deal for Dylan with Artie Mogull, gave an
acetate of "Blowin' In The Wind," along with another Dylan
composition, "Tomorrow Is A Long Time," to Milt Okun, who, in addition
to his work with Peter, Paul and Mary, now worked with the Chad Mitchell Trio
and the Brothers Four.
Okun decided it was
a good song for the Mitchells, who began to perform it and were sufficiently
enthusiastic to record it for their next album. "Blowin' In The
Wind" made it's first appearance on record on The Chad Mitchell
Trio In Action (Kapp Records 3313), released in March 1963, but,
apparently due to a dispute with their producer Bob Bollard, who preferred
they steer clear of political material, the Mitchells did not release the
song as a single. (Later, Kapp would rename the album Blowin' In The
Wind.)
Toward the end of 1962, Grossman approached Peter, Paul and
Mary with the song. "With very few exceptions, the songs came from
the three of us," Yarrow said. "Albert suggested a few
songs. He brought us 'Blowin' In The Wind,' even though we knew Bobby.
He came to us with an acetate when we were at the Gate of Horn performing, and I
remember that I just freaked out over it. He was more possessed about
'Don't Think Twice,' and I thought 'Blowin' In The Wind' was just about
the best song I could have imagined at the time. It was the first time
that we went in and recorded a song and put it out as a single long before it
was on an album. The rest of the time we'd put out an album, and we'd see
what the pundits from the field would say then release a single."
(Passed on by
Peter, Paul and Mary for the moment, "Don't Think Twice, It's All
Right" was released on Atlantic Records in late May as the debut
single by a new folk trio, the New World Singers, whose members were Gil
Turner, Happy Traum and Bob Cohen. But it did not chart, and Peter, Paul
and Mary would get around to it a little later.)
Warners did not
release the song immediately, instead letting all the singles from (Moving) run their course in the early months of 1963, but Peter, Paul and Mary
began singing "Blowin' In The Wind" at their concerts.
"They always introduced it with the line: 'Now we'd like to sing a song
written by the most important folk artist in America today, Bob Dylan,"
wrote Anthony Scaduto. (Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography, New York:
Grosset & Dunlap, 1971)
"I don't
recall actually touting his career," said Stookey. "I
think we just did a lot of his material, which of course accomplished the
same thing. But I don't even recall mentioning his name on-stage. It
was just common knowledge that there were some lyrics here that were going to
hit you between the eyes."
Warner Bros.
finally released Peter, Paul and Mary's recording of "Blowin' In The
Wind" on June 18, 1963, during the week that "Puff" fell off the
charts. Proof that the song's point was possible to miss came with the
review in the June 22 issue of Billboard, which described
"this slick ditty" as "a sailor's lament, sung softly and
tenderly."
In it's first eight
business days of release, "Blowin' In The Wind" sold 320,000 copies,
making it the fastest selling single in Warner's five-year history. It
entered the charts for the week ending June 29, peaking at #2 behind Little
Stevie Wonder's "Fingertips (Part II)" on the chart for the week
ending August 17. (It spent five weeks at the top of the Middle-Road
Singles chart, starting on August 3.) It remains the most successful
single recording of a Bob Dylan song on the Hot 100. Though never certified by
the Record Industry Association of America, it is reported to have sold
two million copies. It would win Peter, Paul and Mary Grammy Awards for
Best Performance by a Vocal Group and Best Folk recording for the second year in
a row.
("Puff, The
Magic Dragon," nominated for Best Recording for Children, lost
to Leonard Bernstein's Bernstein Conducts for Young People.)
Thus, in the summer
of 1963, Peter, Paul and Mary had two albums in the charts as they enjoyed their
third Top 10 single. They had moved up to playing theaters and outdoor
venues like the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium. They were poised to
star at the third Newport Folk Festival.
Newport had not had
folk festivals in 1961 or '62, but the festival was re-started in 1963 by George
Wein, who formed a committee consisting of Theo Bikel, Jean Ritchie, Pete
Seeger, Clarence Cooper, Erik Darling, Bill Clifton and Peter Yarrow to
organize the event. As one of the younger voices on this board of
directors, Yarrow focused attention on newer performers, who he said
should get their own showcase.
Yarrow spoke
of his "belief that young singer-songwriters were really important,
and at my insistence at the Newport board that we acknowledge these new
singer-songwriters in a concert that I offered to put together and host, and I
would choose it and book the talents on Sunday mornings. It was called the
New Folks Concert. To me, we were missing the boat if all we were
doing was just celebrating the traditions from which the music of Peter, Paul
and Mary and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan came.
Important as that
was, the other important legacy that we had to acknowledge and protect was
that of the urban, educated singer-songwriter and performer in the folk
idiom who didn't necessarily emulate the traditional musical form but just its
spirit and it's soul, hopefully in a tasteful way. And so, that New
Folks Concert was totally consistent with that vision that Yarrow would continue
throughout his career, as he helped found the Kerrville Folk
Festival and other
forums for developing singer-songwriters. At Freebody Park in Newport, Rhode
Island, on July 26-28, 1963, before an audience estimated at between 37,000 and
46,000 people, such emerging performers as Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Peter La Farge
and Ian and Sylvia got to display their talents, along with an older generation
including Ramblin' Jack Elliot ad Ed McCurdy, folk blues performers like
Mississippi John Hurt and gospel-oriented groups like the Freedom Singers
(including Bernice Johnson, later Bernice Reagon, who would go on to found Sweet
Honey in the Rock).
But of course the
major names at the festival remained Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and
Mary. The last evening closed with Dylan singing "Blowin' In The
Wind," joined by Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary and the Freedom Singers,
followed by the inevitable "We Shall Overcome." (Excerpts from
the festival, featuring an uncredited Peter, Paul and Mary, can be heard on the
1964 Vanguard Records album The Newport Folk Festival, 1963-- The
Evening Concerts, Vol. 1.) The same people reconvened a month
later for the March on Washington. (highlights of the March, including a
snippet of Peter, Paul and Mary's performance, can be heard on the 1964 Folkways
Records album We Shall Overcome!)
Yarrow spoke of the
relationship between the music and the political movements of the time.
"In no way did I think that folk music alone was going to do it, but
I did think it was more than simply the window dressing or the accompaniment to
events that were changing the concept of Americans as to who they were and what
they might be on a day-to-day basis," he said. "I felt
that it had a reciprocal relationship with those events. Events would
articulate themselves, and then the music would comment on them and form a
consensus for certain people who were listening to the music, and that would be
fed back into the system, and energizing it, and so forth and so on,
rocking back and forth and moving forward, and it was in this way that the civil
rights movement proceeded. It was in this way that the anti-Vietnam War
movement proceeded."
The week of the
March on Washington, as the group spent its evenings appearing with Odetta at
the Carter Barron Amphitheatre, Warner Bros. released Peter, Paul and Mary's
sixth single, "Don't Think Twice, It's All
Right." The
result was a third straight Top 10 hit, as the single peaked at #9 for the week
ending October 26.
In September,
Peter, Paul and Mary toured the U.K., also playing a date in Paris. (They
were reported to be recording songs in German, French and Italian for the
European market.) In England, "Blowin' In The Wind"
entered the charts the following month, getting to #13 and paving the way for
Dylan's appearance there the following spring. In America, Dylan's second
album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, containing his versions of
"Blowin' In The Wind" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All
Right," released the previous May, finally made the charts in
the wake of Peter, Paul and Mary's hit versions. It would reach #22 and,
after seven years, go gold.
On September 23, Warner Bros. Records and Frank
Sinatra's Reprise Records signed a merger agreement by which Reprise became
a subsidiary of Warner, while Sinatra received one-third of the shares of
the combined company and a seat on it's board of directors, also agreeing
to a movie deal with the parent motion picture company. The deal brought
in Reprise head Mo Ostin as the second-in-command at Warner. At the end of
the month, company president Mike Maitland announced that the fiscal year
1962-1963, ending September 30, had been the most successful in the company's
history, due largely to Peter, Paul and Mary. Warner Bros. Records
was now a major record label.
The following week,
the trio's third album, In The Wind, was released. In
addition to "Blowin' In The Wind" and "Don't Think Twice, It's
All Right," it contained Dylan's "Quit You Lowdown
Ways,"
a song Dylan also had recorded for Freewheelin' on July 9, 1962,
but that had not been released on the finished album. (It was released in
1991 on The Bootleg Series boxed set.) Dylan replaced John Court as
the group's liner note writer, penning a reminiscence about his days with them
at the Gaslight in 1961. "It is 'f these times that I remember most
sadly--- ," Dylan wrote, "For they're gone--- /An they'll
not never come again-- ." But he added that "Peter, Paul
and Mary're now carryin the feelin/that was inside them walls up the steps to
the whole/outside world-- ."
The world was ready
to receive that feelin': In The Wind blasted onto Billboard's Top LP's chart for the week ending October 26 at #12. That week, the
typically busy group was touring the West Coast, playing primarily at
colleges-- the University of Colorado on the 22nd; Central Washington
College on the 23rd; the University of Puget Sound on the 24th; the
Civic Auditorium in Stockton, California, on the 25th; South Nevada
University on the 26th.
That week Peter,
Paul and Mary returned to #1; (Moving) moved up from #6 to #4.
But the commercial peak in the career of Peter, Paul and Mary occurred the
following week. In Billboard's November 2 issue, the group's three
albums were all in the top 10: In The Wind hit #1 for the
first of five weeks; Peter, Paul and Mary dropped to #2; (Moving) was #6. There would be 10 more weeks from now through February
1964 that the three albums would rank in the top 10 together. In
The Wind was certified gold on November 13, only a month into release;
it stayed in the charts 80 weeks. By the end of the month, Warner
Bros. merchandising director Joel Friedman announced that Peter, Paul and
Mary had sold a million copies in the U.S. alone, not counting record club
sales. (At this time, a gold record award indicated sales of $1 million'
worth of records at manufacturer's wholesale prices, certified by the
Record Industry Association of America, meaning sales of roughly half a
million copies. Platinum record awards for sales of a million copies were
not instituted until 1976.)
The third single
from In The Wind, released in November, was "Stewball,"
the ballad of a hapless but triumphant racehorse that had been suggested to the
group by Grossman. Though the album credits it to
Mezzetti/Stookey/Okun/Travers, "Stewball" is based on a 19th century
song called "skewbald," and it's worth noting that much of the
group's repertoire was coming to be made up of traditional or non-copyright
material for which they had provided new lyrics and arrangements. For
example, In The Wind also included "Tell It On The
Mountain,"
a version of the gospel song "Go Tell It On The Mountain,"
credited to "Stookey/Yarrow/Okun/Travers," and "Freight
Train," a song identified with folk singer Elizabeth Cotton,
here credited to "Mezzetti/Stookey/Okun/Travers."
"Stewball" was not as big a hit as its predecessors, peaking at
#35 in the Hot 100 on December 28. Even before then, Warner Bros. had
released "A'Soalin'" from (Moving) as a Christmas single;
it missed the Billboard chart, but spent two weeks in the Cash
Box magazine Top 100, peaking at #79. The group's seven singles
in release during 1963, three of which reached the Top 10, placed
them at seventh place among the top singles artists of the year, according
to Joel Whitburn. In its year-end issue, Billboard ranked
Peter, Paul and Mary the top LP artists of 1963.
Warner released a
fourth single from In The Wind with "Tell It On The
Mountain" in February 1964, as the hard-working trio played a string
of one-nighters in the upper south, then went on to the upper midwest. It
peaked at #33 in Billboard on April 4 (getting two notches higher in Cash
Box).
Billboard's March 28 issue contained a "Music On Campus" supplement
including an article about Albert B. Grossman Management (ABGM): "It's
'Folkthink' At ABGM." "Most valuable property at
ABGM is Peter, Paul and Mary, who play from four to six college concerts a
week," the article reported, citing Charles Rothschild of the
company. "When Peter, Paul and Mary play a college date, ABGM
has program books on hand for $1 a throw. The act stays after the concert
and autographs the books for the collegians. The books carry articles by
and about the artists."
Peter, Paul and
Mary placed first in the supplement's ranking of most popular folk groups on
campus, but the most popular group in general was a recent name: the
Beatles.
No wonder.
The same week that 'Tell It On The Mountain" peaked on the Hot 100, the Top
Five read as follows: #1 "Can't Buy Me Love," by the Beatles;
#2 "Twist And Shout," by the Beatles; #3 She Loves You," by
the Beatles; #4 I Want To Hold Your Hand," by the Beatles; and #5
"Please Please Me," by the Beatles. The Beatles also occupied #s
31, 41, 46, 58, 65, 68 and 79.
Noel Stookey, for
one was impressed. "The Beatles ... were very self-effacing and
really clever and wonderful musicians," he said more than 30 years
later. "We have not begun to scratch the impact that the
Lennon-McCartney music machine will have on us in the next century. Did
you see a very strange movie [set] at some time in the future called Demolition
Man? Do you remember the musical hook? It was the fact that
everything was done in snippets. They were all 30-second and 60-second
commercials. That's what people really loved. They all wanted to
hear the commercial tunes. [In the film, the commercial jingles of the
present day have become the popular music of the future.]
"Well, I
think, to a large extent, the enormity of music that was produced by Lennon and
McCartney just was staggering. We just haven't as a a people begun to
process it. I think some of the lyrics may be of their time, but I think
melodically the pieces are just classic. And as it comes back,
they're just going to be gorgeous rewoven in countless different ways and
reperformed in countless different ways."
Immediately, of
course, the dominance of the Beatles and the British pop-rock performers who
followed in their wake acted as overwhelming competition to all existing
performers and genres of popular music, including folk singers Peter, Paul
and Mary.
One area in which
the Beatles did not compete with the trio-- not yet, anyway-- was in their
political influence. In "Three's Company," an article published
in the Saturday Evening Post on May 30, Peter Yarrow told authors
Alfred G. Aronowitz and Marshall Blonsky that his group could "mobilize the
youth of America .. in a way that nobody else could," even to the
point of swaying a presidential election if they traveled with a
candidate, something that, considering the upcoming race between
Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, they did not intend to do. (Quoted in Minstrels
Of The Dawn: The Folk-Protest Singer As A Cultural Hero, by
Jerome L. Rodnitzky, Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1976) Four years later.
Yarrow would put this assertion to the test.
In June, as the
trio toured Australia, Warner Bros. joined the new rock 'n' roll fervor--
after a fashion-- by releasing as a new Peter, Paul and Mary single "Oh,
Rock My Soul (Part 1)," an edited version of one of the selections on the
group's upcoming double-LP set Peter, Paul and Mary In Concert.
Credited to Yarrow, it was a new version of one of the old gospel song 'Bosom Of
Abraham." It grazed the charts, peaking at #93.
The summer of 1964
was "Freedom Summer," a season when civil rights workers
streamed into Mississippi to register black voters. Among those workers
were two white New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman and Henry Schwerner, and a
black man from Meridan, Mississippi, James Chaney, all in their
twenties, who disappeared on June 21. Their bodies were found on
August 4 in an earthen dam. At Goodman's funeral, Peter, Paul and Mary
sang, "How many deaths will it take..."
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