Ian Tyson of Ian and Sylvia once said that folk music has always been there—sometimes hard to find but always there. When Peter, Paul and Mary emerged, folk was in one of its hard-to-find phases. As we saw from Senator Kenneth Keating’s comments, the McCarthy era had postulated a connection between communism and folk music, which resulted in a blacklist of the generation that included Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Cisco Houston, and Woody Guthrie.1 These were the artists who immediately preceded the musicians of the folk revival of the early sixties, which gave us the rise to popularity of the protest song. Before that, protest songs were used to build community among activists; after that they made the top forty. Peter, Paul and Mary were one of the groups that made that happen.
With the nation still reeling from the witch hunts of Joe McCarthy and his followers, the delight that the House Un-American Activities Committee took in throwing American citizens over the cliff, and the Cold War paranoia, an aura of Red-baiting was constructed around folk music, like a moat around a castle, even as the genre became incredibly popular. In fact, its very popularity made the music suspect because it was popular among the young. The nascent left-wing political stirrings of college students were creating a generation gap at the same time that the recent election of John F. Kennedy promised an end to the right-wing oppression and militarism that had characterized the culture during the Eisenhower years. It was that generation gap leading to the election of John F. Kennedy that led to folk music’s coming out of hiding and into the sunlight once more.
Carolyn Hester credits the election of John F. Kennedy with the rise of folk music. “It’s been said that if Kennedy had not become president, there could not have been a Bob Dylan,” she declares. Whether or not the connection is that direct, it is accurate to say that the Kennedy election created a climate in the country of hope. Even if its actions did not always lean to the left, his administration lightened the mood.
The Village folk revival or, as Dave Van Ronk called it, the Great Folk Scare, was kicking off during the rise of Kennedy’s Camelot, and the artists who would later become Peter, Paul and Mary all chased it to Greenwich Village, arriving there separately. Peter Yarrow, recently graduated from Cornell with a degree in psychology, showed up to build a career as a folk singer, while Noel Paul Stookey, just out of Michigan State, came there to become a standup comic. Mary Travers was already on the premises; she’d grown up in the Village and had been singing around for a few years already, primarily as a member of the Song Swappers, who backed up Pete Seeger on two of his albums, and as a member of the cast of comedian Mort Sahl’s Broadway show The Next President.2
In those days, as noted earlier, the members of the Village community would gather in Washington Square Park on Sunday afternoons to play and sing informally, not necessarily to build their careers but to have fun. The three singers who would become Peter, Paul and Mary met in the park and first sang together there, although the idea of uniting as a trio did not occur to them. Each one still continued to pursue a solo career.
If the idea of forming a trio did not cross their minds, it did cross Albert Grossman’s. Grossman, one of the most powerful managers in folk music, was continually on the search for an act that would make both good music and good money in the marketplace. He looked at the huge success of the Kingston Trio and decided he wanted a piece of that. There was room for another folk trio, especially if it had something the others did not. Grossman studied the field and saw that what the other groups lacked were three essential elements: a woman singer, which hadn’t been seen since the Weavers disbanded due to the blacklist, a sense of humor, and an overall sense of fun. He made a decision: he would put a group together. It wasn’t as easy a task as he’d figured it was going to be. His first attempt to flesh out his vision consisted of his clients Bob Gibson, Hamilton Camp, and Carolyn Hester, but they didn’t quite have the intangible qualities he was looking for. So he kept on trying until he came up with the combination of Peter Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and, again, Carolyn Hester, who decided the fit wasn’t quite right and left. Mary Travers came in to replace her and this time everything clicked. Albert Grossman was the most appropriate manager for a group like Peter, Paul and Mary. As Peter Yarrow said,
[Albert] was concerned first and foremost with authenticity. Did the music have real substance, value and honesty? But he was also concerned with having an impact and influence in the larger world, the heartland. It was a very rare combination. Everybody was ready for the change, but how could you reach them? How could you tap the public’s ability to take in and incorporate our taste? Albert realized it wasn’t enough to just write and perform songs, that there was a multitude of ways to be successful and to happen, to become important, to be wanted by that public. It was necessary to couple artistic success with enormous economic success in order for that to take place.3
The newly formed trio named themselves Peter, Paul and Mary for two reasons: first, the name had a Biblical ring to it, recalling the phrase Peter, Paul, and Moses and, second, it recalled a song Odetta sang, “I Was Born About 10,000 Years Ago,” which refers to Peter, Paul, and Moses joining in a game of ring around the roses. A name touching on Odetta and the Bible? How could it miss?
After about six months of rehearsing, the trio made its debut at Gerde’s Folk City. The circumstances were less than auspicious. Peter Yarrow was playing the club as a single when Grossman went to Mike Porco, who operated Gerde’s, and offered him the trio. Porco said he would not pay the extra twenty dollars for all three singers, so Grossman put it up himself, allowing Peter, Paul and Mary to make a subsidized debut as a trio.4 They had not yet polished their trio act, so for this, their debut performance, Yarrow did a solo set, then Stookey did his comedy routine, followed by a solo set by Mary. Only after all three had performed separately did they do a trio set, because they had only twelve songs, the twelve that made up their first album, which was not enough to make up a night at a club. After that appearance, Grossman brought in vocal arranger Milt Okum, who had previously coached the Chad Mitchell Trio and the Harry Belafonte Singers. Okum helped them find the three-part vocal harmonies that made their sound unique. After his coaching, the trio made a more proper debut at the Bitter End and signed a contract with Warner Brothers Records.
Their first album contained “If I Had a Hammer,” which had been written by Pete Seeger and Lee Hayes for the Weavers. A strong anti-war song with a hook that could not be escaped and a chorus that almost demanded that you sing along with it as well as a strong political statement, it was the perfect song for the emerging civil rights movement. Seeger, who came up with the melody for the song, later said he could never get the tune quite right, but Peter, Paul and Mary got hold of it, tweaked it a little, and solved the problems he could not. “If I Had a Hammer” became a standard of the civil rights movement. Just how big a part Peter, Paul and Mary played in the movement has been questioned. They walked a tight line between entertainment and activism from the start, mixing humor and light-hearted songs with their protest material so that they came across as tough but soft simultaneously. As Peter Yarrow said, on the occasion of the group’s receiving the Songwriters Hall of Fame Lifetime Achievement Award, “The songs we sing invite the participation of the listener, who is central to finding a way of creating the life of the song. It’s the difference between poetry and didactic writing. One tells you, ‘[T]his is it,’ and the other says, ‘Let’s find this together.’” Noel Paul Stookey amplified Yarrow’s comments: “Whether it’s your own material or somebody else’s material, it’s essential that you identify with it thoroughly. It’s like you want to archive it; you want to freeze it in terms of your perspective on it, then move on, because folk music is that volatile and comments not only on overall human concerns but also on the specifics.”5
This philosophy of music and its purpose allowed the trio to walk straight down that center line between entertainment and activism. Although progressive politics was a part of their makeup from the beginning, they picked and chose the battles they would enter carefully, choosing to skip Mississippi’s Freedom Summer. They did, however, go in 1963 to the Million Man March on Washington, where they sang “If I Had a Hammer” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” before Dr. King spoke. They also showed up for nearly every march for civil rights: Washington, Selma, Alabama. Paul Stookey said, “You have to put your body on the line from time to time in order to make a statement or change a law.”6 Coretta King, Martin’s widow, praised their efforts, saying, “Peter, Paul and Mary are not only three of the greatest folk artists ever, but also three of the performing arts’ most outstanding champions of social justice and peace. They have lent their time and talents to the civil rights movement. labor struggles, and countless campaigns for human rights for decades, and their compassion and commitment remain as strong as their extraordinary artistry.”7
As important as their activism was, however, the trio’s most significant contribution to the civil rights movement was probably their championing of the topical songwriters. They recorded Bob Dylan’s material very early, having a hit with “Blowin’ in the Wind” before his own recording of it was released. Their hit version of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” lifted Dylan’s own album containing the song, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, into the top thirty. At that time, Dylan was being managed by Roy Silver, who also had among his clients Bill Cosby, Joan Rivers, Cass Elliot, and Hamilton Camp. Al Grossman saw there was money to be made from Bob Dylan and tried to buy his contract from Silver, who wanted ten thousand dollars. Grossman thought this was an excessive amount to pay for an unknown folkie with a voice like a frog’s and whose first album had topped out at 2,500 copies. Peter, Paul and Mary, great fans of Dylan’s, put up $5,000 and Grossman made the deal. Even though their investment entitled them to a share of Dylan’s profits, they did not take an ownership stake. They put up the money simply because they liked Dylan’s work and wanted him to have the best management possible.8 They were also great supporters of the new breed of protest writers like Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Peter La Farge, Janis Ian, and the others, recording their songs and working to bring the topical song artists to a larger audience by using them as opening acts on their tours.
But as we shall see, it was as anti-war activists that Peter, Paul and Mary had their biggest impact. We’ll discuss that aspect of their professional and personal lives in the second section of this book. In the meantime, we’ll take a look at Bob Dylan’s contributions to the civil rights movement.