When Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey of the iconic folk group Peter, Paul and Mary take the stage in Anaheim on Saturday shadows of the past will join in the room, Stookey says.
“When Peter and I do a show together it’s a bit nostalgic,” Stookey says. “It can’t help but be, because we’re singing 60 years of history.”
But the music and its message remain as strong and alive as it was when Yarrow, Stookey and the late Mary Travers first burst onto the scene, Stookey says, and it might be as relevant and needed today as it was when the trio first emerged as a large part of the sound of the ’60s at the start of that decade.
“Because of the changing political times, and the one we’re now, there’s an urgency not only to reconnect, but also to reconfirm some of the values that folk music and it’s ethic have proposed for countless years,” Stookey says.
“Puff (The Magic Dragon)” might be their best known song, and “Leaving On A Jet Plane” their only No. 1 hit but Peter, Paul and Mary also popularized the role of music as protest with covers of songs such as “Blowin’ In The Wind” by the then-still-little-known Bob Dylan and “If I Had A Hammer (The Hammer Song),” a Pete Seeger composition, both of which they famously sang at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 as part of the March on Washington, the landmark civil rights rally at which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Yarrow was typically the more politically motivated singer-songwriter in the group, while Stookey often focused on the spiritual, he says. That continues to this day, with the handful of concerts they play together as a duo featuring not just Peter, Paul and Mary tunes, but solo work from both of the surviving members.
“My solo performances are about, I’d say, 90 percent the spiritual component of the political, and Peter’s are, I think, about 90 percent the political perspective of the spiritual,” Stookey says with a laugh. “But the fact is we both come from the ethic of folk music, which Noel says, because he’s on a roll, not wanting to slow down, had an impact, more of an impact than people recognize, especially in the early ’60s.
“All of the genres started to decide then that you didn’t have to talk about boy-girl relationships, and that there were things we shared in common as a people that deserved discussion,” he says. “And if an artist like Springsteen or Paul Simon or Joni Mitchell or Peter, Paul and Mary could bring up a subject on stage, then it could encourage a kind of discourse.”
Travers, who died in 2009, is absent but never forgotten in the shows that Stookey and Yarrow play.
“It quickly becomes obvious that the audience is fulfilling Mary’s role,” Stookey says. “Peter and I sometimes find ourselves playing guitar and singing harmony and holding on for dear life.”
The different backgrounds and eclectic interests of the Yarrow, Stookey and Travers greatly contributed to the legacy and appeal of the trio that still endures, Stookey says.
“One of us was bound to speak to the Midwesterner with humor and a baritone voice like Bing Crosby,” he says referring to his own background. “And another was going to be an intense representative of the cultural Jew with all the guilt and responsibility that he had. And the other was this brassy good-looking woman who’d been on the front of picket lines.
“Somewhere out of that mix the audience is pretty broad,” Stookey says. “And sometimes we were criticized for that, that we had no specific cultural right to sing Appalachian songs or Elizabethan songs or blues, but the wonderful thing about folk music is that it is inclusive, and in its most loving expression it allows the performer to invest the ethic with their authentic representation.”
Stookey is concerned, to put it mildly, about the direction he sees the country heading, and hopes that the role of folk music and musicians might once again rise up in common voice.
“I do think that the times in which we live are going to bring forth from a lot of performers in one sense disbelief, but as always, it is helpful to identify the problem and then people bring their own inventions to the solution,” he says. “Sometimes a performer can contribute, when he sees a clear-cut answer or path or remedy, he may suggest it in a song.
“I think we may be seeing a lot of that in the next four years.”
But even more than protest songs or rallies Stookey says his faith in humanity and the grace that comes with love give the greatest hope of all.
“I draw so much strength from the ultimate core of life itself,” he says. “I think that love in so many circumstances is the answer. The Beatles didn’t just make that up, I think they discovered it, and many of us do.
“And they recognize that a soft word, a respectful word, is quite often more of a contributing word toward peace than a retaliation or a demonstration of power. I find some kind of strength to that in concerts, and my performances tend to salute that perspective.”
Contact the writer: 714-796-7787 or plarsen@scng.com
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