An Interview with Peter, Paul and Mary

February 10, 1969

By JENNIE BUCKNER
Lantern Staff Writer

Peter, Paul and Mary are three, yet one; they have individuality, yet unity. It shows in their music--as those who attended the group's Friday night concert at St. John Arena will attest--and it shows in their talk.

Paul described the group as "three individuals who get along precisely."

"Peter, Paul and Mary is our life," he said, "or at least seven eights of it. Everything else is peripheral.

"Even when Peter was working on the film 'You Are What You Eat' he was Peter, Paul and Mary first."

Mary explained that the group's unity results, in part, from "the common ethical base we share and express in our music."

"We all may not agree on an issue initially, but we talk it out among ourselves," she said.

The ethical base for their music is what has held the group together for the nine years they have been performing, she said.

"It is impossible to say whether we are musicians or social commentators first," she went on. "It is very tied up together with us."

The ethical base also "keeps our music from going stale," she said. "Take a song like 'Blowin' in the Wind,' which is sort of our national anthem. A song like that means so much you don't get tired of it. It means something different with different concerts."

She explained, "When we sang it in the march on Washington the second verse, concerned with civil rights, was the most important. When we performed at a Hiroshima hospital, however, the last anti-war verse held all the meaning."

Mary said that the group's feelings are not expressed in just protest songs or Bob Dylan tunes. "Part of what we believe is expressed in simple, straightforward songs that say something very true about life."

When deciding what to sing from their large repertoire at a given concert, the group does not try to "psych out" the audience, Mary said. "It's not our duty to do that, and besides that's a dangerous game to play."

"You have to sing what you think is right, what you want to sing," she said.

The group once walked off a show where the sponsor tried to tell them what to sing. "A musician must be true to himself and not let some businessman dictate what can be sung," she said.

"Students in state universities have much the same problem," she said. "You have businessmen trying to tell educators and students how to educate, how to run educational institutions."

Mary said she could understand student unrest, but added that she felt the radical left was "really messing itself up."

"The system in our nation is not the best, but it can be changed. Anarchy won't change it, however," she said. "Anarchy will only lead to further repression.

"People who want social change can have it if they are willing to work for it. We've worked hard these nine years for that--and we are going to keep right on doing so."

Bob Dylan and Selections from the Newport Folk Festival - July 26, 1963

The Friday evening concert (July 26) of Newport 1963 marked the debut performance of Bob Dylan at the festival, which helped to create his reputation as one of the greatest American folk singer-songwriters of the 1960s. The show that night, which ran from 8:30-11:30 p.m., also featured the Freedom Singers, Jean Redpath, Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul & Mary.

Video footage from that night:

Peter, Paul and Mary - "If I Had a Hammer":


Bob Dylan - "Talkin' World War III Blues":


Bob Dylan with Joan Baez - "With God on Our Side":


Bob Dylan - "Only a Pawn in Their Game":


Bob Dylan with Pete Seeger, the Freedom Singers, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul & Mary - "Blowin' in the Wind":


Other songs performed that night:

Bill Monroe - "Uncle Pen":


Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee - "Crow Jane Blues":


Jean Carignan - "Reel" (audio from a Newport show):


Jean Carignan - "Devil's Dream" (audio from a Newport show):


Peter, Paul and Mary - "Tell It on the Mountain":


Doc Watson - "Every Day Dirt":


Doc Watson - "Country Blues":


Bob Dylan - "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues":


Bob Dylan - "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall":


Ensemble - "We Shall Overcome":


The complete set list from the evening concert reel-to-reel tapes is as follows:

1. Bill Monroe & the Bluegrass Boys - Mule Skinner Blues
2. Bill Monroe & the Bluegrass Boys - Uncle Pen
3. Bill Monroe & the Bluegrass Boys - Devil's Dream
4. Bill Monroe & the Bluegrass Boys - Molly and Tenbrooks
5. Bill Monroe & the Bluegrass Boys - I Am a Pilgrim
6. Bill Monroe & the Bluegrass Boys - Rawhide
7. Raun MacKinnon - I Am Going Home
8. Raun MacKinnon - When I'm Gone
9. Raun MacKinnon - Medgar Evers Lullaby
10. Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee - Crow Jane Blues
11. Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee - I Woke Up This Morning and Could Hardly See
12. Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee - If You Don't Want to Be My Neighbor, Please Be My Friend
13. Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee - Movin' to Kansas City
14. Hélène Baillargeon & Jean Carignan - ("songs of French Canada")
15. Peter, Paul and Mary - Tell It on the Mountain
16. Peter, Paul and Mary - Settle Down (Goin' Down That Highway)
17. Peter, Paul and Mary - Blue (2 versions)
18. Peter, Paul and Mary - 500 Miles
19. Peter, Paul and Mary - Puff, the Magic Dragon
20. Peter, Paul and Mary - Blowin' in the Wind
21. Peter, Paul and Mary - If I Had My Way
22. Peter, Paul and Mary - If I Had a Hammer
23. The Freedom Singers - Trying to Make Georgia My Home
24. The Freedom Singers - Been Down Into the South
25. The Freedom Singers - Woke Up
26. The Freedom Singers - Get on Board
27. The Freedom Singers - Guide My Feet
28. Jean Redpath - Dowie Dens o' Yarrow
29. Jean Redpath - Muckin' o' Geordie's Byre
30. Jean Redpath - The Song of the Seals
31. Doc Watson - Every Day Dirt
32. Doc Watson - The Train That Carried My Girl from Town
33. Doc Watson - Country Blues
34. Doc Watson - What Does the Deep Sea Say (with Bill Monroe)
35. Doc Watson - What Would You Give in Exchange (with Bill Monroe)
36. Doc Watson - Feast Here Tonight (with Bill Monroe)
37. Bob Dylan - Talkin' World War III Blues
38. Bob Dylan - With God on Our Side (with Joan Baez)
39. Bob Dylan - Only a Pawn in Their Game
40. Bob Dylan - Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues
41. Bob Dylan - A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
42. Bob Dylan - Blowin' in the Wind (with Pete Seeger, the Freedom Singers, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul & Mary)
43. Bob Dylan - We Shall Overcome (with Pete Seeger, the Freedom Singers, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul & Mary)

Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival & American Society, 1940-1970

By Ronald D. Cohen

For a brief period from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, folk music captured a mass audience in the United States as college students and others swarmed to concerts by the likes of Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. In this comprehensive study, Ronald D. Cohen reconstructs the history of this singular cultural moment, tracing its origins to the early decades of the twentieth century.

Drawing on scores of interviews and numerous manuscript collections, as well as his own extensive files, Cohen shows how a broad range of traditions - from hillbilly, gospel, blues, and sea shanties to cowboy, ethnic, and political protest music - all contributed to the genre known as folk. He documents the crucial work of John Lomax and other collectors who, with the assistance of recording companies, preserved and distributed folk music in 1920s. During the 1930s and 1940s, the emergence of Left-wing politics and the rise of the commercial music marketplace helped to stimulate wider interest in folk music. Stars emerged, such as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, and Josh White. With the success of the Weavers and the Kingston Trio in the 1950s, the stage was set for the full-blown "folk revival" of the early 1960s.

Centered in New York's Greenwich Village and sustained by a flourishing record industry, the revival spread to college campuses and communities across the country. It included a wide array of performers and a supporting cast of journalists, club owners, record company executives, political activists, managers, and organizers. By 1965 the boom had passed its peak, as rock and roll came to dominate the marketplace, but the folk revival left an enduring musical legacy in American culture.

Excerpt

Broadside attracted many new singer-songwriters. Via Ohio State University. Phil Ochs arrived in the Village in mid-1962 and participated in his first Folk City hootenanny in July, doing more country than folk, but he soon moved into protest music. Gil Turner brought him around to the Broadside meetings and he became a regular. When the editors called for a song about James Meredith's troubles at the University of Mississippi, Ochs responded in November with "Ballad of Oxford, Mississippi." Ochs, Dylan, and their colleagues developed an intense and sometimes competitive fellowship. Josh Dunson described one stimulating taping session at the Friesens' in Broadside no. 20, with Turner, Dylan, Seeger, Ochs and Happy Traum. Dylan sang "Masters of War" followed by "Playboys and Playgirls Ain't Gonna Run My World," then Ochs did one about striking miners in Hazard, Kentucky. "We were all out of breath without breathing hard," Dunson concluded, "that feeling you get when a lot of good things happen all at once. Pete expressed it, leaning back in his chair, saying slowly in dreamy tones: 'You know, in the past five months I haven't heard as many good songs and as much good music as I heard here tonight.'"

Moe Asch, who early on gave Broadside financial support, suggested issuing an album of songs by the regulars under a new Broadside Records label. Ochs, Turner, Matt McGinn, Seeger, Peter LaFarge, Mark Spoelstra, Happy Traum, and Dylan (aka "Blind Boy Grunt" because of his Columbia Records contract) gathered at the Cue Recording studio to cut the sides for Broadside Ballads, which appeared in late 1963. Five of the fifteen songs were Dylan compositions, starting with the New World Singers' performance of "Blowin' in the Wind."

The Theater Is in the Street: Politics and Public Performance in Sixties America

by Bradford D. Martin

Increasingly, the Freedom Singers came to share venues with performers in the folk revival, not only at the March on Washington but also at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival and the 1964 Mississippi Caravan of Music. Performers at the March on Washington included Seeger, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Odetta, and Peter, Paul and Mary. At the Newport festival, the Freedom Singers' influence permeated the occasion, as nearly every white folk performer included at least one a cappella selection and a freedom song in his or her repertoire. Seeger viewed the impressive attendance of forty thousand as evidence of a "revived" festival--indeed, though it had begun in 1959, it had not been held the previous two years--crediting the confluence of civil rights and folk music. During the Mississippi Caravan of Music it became clear that the benefits of folk music's alliance with the Freedom Singers worked both ways. Caravan musicians including Seeger, Guy Carawan, Phil Ochs, and Judy Collins encouraged voter registration by staying in Mississippi "for a week or two or sometimes more" and singing at meetings and freedom schools. True to both the oral tradition of folksinging and SNCC's agenda of developing indigenous leadership, the Caravan sessions at the freedom schools sparked young Mississippians to create their own freedom songs.

Dissent in the Heartland: The Sixties at Indiana University

By Mary Ann Wynkoop

This grassroots view of student activism in the 1960s chronicles the years of protest at one Midwestern university. Located in a region of farmland, conservative politics, and traditional family values, Indiana University was home to the antiwar protestors, civil rights activists, members of the counterculture, and feminists who helped change the heart of Middle America. Its students made their voices heard on issues from such local matters as dorm curfews and self-governance to national issues of racism, sexism, and the Vietnam War. Their recognition that the personal was the political would change them forever. The protest movement they helped shape would reach into the heart-land in ways that would redefine higher education, politics, and cultural values. Based on research in primary sources, interviews, and FBI files, Dissent in the Heartland reveals the Midwestern pulse of the Sixties, beating firmly, far from the elite schools and urban centers of the East and West.

Excerpt

Members of SDS and other student groups across the country began criticizing the war in Vietnam, and on Easter 1965 twenty thousand protestors marched on the Washington monument. Folksingers Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, and the Freedom Singers led the crowd in singing "We Shall Overcome." The demonstrators presented Congress with a petition to end the war.

[...]

The National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (nicknamed "the Mobe") had organized a Stop the Draft Week from October 14 to 21, 1967. The point of this campaign was to confront Washington policymakers with the fact that thousands of young Americans - straights and hippies, blacks and whites, working class and middle class - were opposed to the war in Vietnam. The week ended on October 21 with the March on the Pentagon. Protestors gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, where they listened to music by Peter, Paul, and Mary and Phil Ochs and speeches by David Dellinger and Dr. Benjamin Spock.

Then the crowd marched across the Arlington Bridge toward the Pentagon, where they were met by military police. The protestors sang songs, talked to the troops, and joined together in a sense of community. Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman chanted "om" as they and others tried to levitate the Pentagon. However, by midnight the police were replaced by the 82nd Division and the scene turned ugly. Paratroopers cleared the area by beating peaceful protestors, who faced their attackers singing the national anthem. By the next morning, only a few hundred were left. The protest was over.

Disorderly Conduct

By Bruce Jackson

Foreword by William M. Kunstler

"What I like about these essays, which cover an array of highly significant topics from peace demonstrations in the 1960s to contemporary federal drug policies, is that the politics and theory seem to derive from what their author saw; with most observers, the politics and theory seem to control what they saw. The result is a rare measure of balance and clarity, a group of articles with remarkable currency. . . .

"We live in an age when an astonishing amount of claptrap is proffered as revealed knowledge by anyone with a word processor and a willing publisher. I find it delightfully refreshing to find so articulate an olio of intelligent and searching pieces that are as articulate as they are provocative. And, happily, Bruce Jackson has been blessed with the gift of laughter, which helps him deliver to us a remarkable sane vision of a world that all too often is more than a little mad."

William M. Kunstler,
from the Foreword

Excerpt

The action got going on the platform. The Bread and Puppet Theater parodied patriotic hymns, then performed a parable, "The Great Warrior." Three busloads from Oakland, California, arrived - "the real heroes in the fight for peace," said the announcer; the crowd cheered. A flautist fluted. Malcolm X's sister gave a rather simpleminded and incoherent speech about "barbarickisms." There were many speeches, but hardly anyone could hear them. It didn't matter much: they weren't for the crowd anyway; they were for the TV cameramen and wire services, whose electronic rigs were arrayed in a brilliant display of technology in the sun. Phil Ochs warbled a song declaring the war over, and Peter, Paul, and Mary sang about the Great Mandala. The music was the first key that something was wrong: it was surface, anachronistic. Those things belonged back in 1963, but not now. If anything, the main stage should have had something violent and angry, the Jefferson Airplane, or even the Fugs, who were elsewhere.

Bob Gibson: I Come for to Sing - The Stops Along the Way of a Folk Music Legend

By Bob Gibson and Carole Bender

Preface by Allan Shaw - Epilogue by Peter Yarrow

with help from his friends:
Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Shel Silverstein, Tom Paxton, Peter Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey, Glenn Yarbrough, Hamilton Camp, Gordon Lightfoot, Roger McGuinn, Studs Terkel, George Carlin, Ed McCurdy, Josh White Jr., Michael Smith, Bryan Bowers, Susan Gibson Hartnett, Meridian Green, Jim Gibson, Rose Garden And Many More!

In 1953 a young man named Bob Gibson, inspired by a meeting with Pete Seeger, left behind a successful job to hit the road collecting folk songs. When he emerged two years later, banjo in hand, ready to share what he'd found, he created an electricity the world of folk music had never seen. His arrangements, songwriting and musical innovations took his audiences by storm, lighting the fire that led to the full-blown folk revival of the late '50s to mid-'60s. He introduced Joan Baez in 1959, Judy Collins in 1960, and the album Gibson & Camp at the Gate of Horn in 1961, created musical history.

Bob co-wrote Abilene, Well, Well, Well and You Can Tell the World. His songs have been recorded by Peter, Paul & Mary, Simon & Garfunkel, the Byrds, the Smothers Brothers, the Kingston Trio and countless others. He is credited as being an influence on most of the performers that came out of the folk revival era, and that impact is still felt in most of today's popular music. He should have been folk music's biggest star, yet his name and story are sadly unknown by most. Out of personal frustration at the lack of information about him. I approached Bob Gibson in the last year of his life with an offer to help him tell his story.
-Carole Bender

In 1974 when doing publicity for my father's album Funky in the Country, I was fortunate to have mentors at the Old Town School explaining how to do it. Hamilton Camp helped too, giving me an earful one day at the cafe under the El tracks, when I showed him my first draft of the bio. He jumped up out of the booth, so frustrated that he was hopping up and down and hollering, "You just don't get it! Your father was not an influence! He invented folk music!"

I'm so glad to hear my dad's voice again, and I do hear it. Carole has done such a fabulous job of capturing his speech. He sounds like he's well again. Carole's offer was what he wanted and needed. Carole has not only gotten his story, she got his cadence. And I think he knew she would.
-Meridian Green

A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America

by Craig Hansen Werner

Many of the students looked to the folk revival for perspectives and information excluded from the nightly news. The framers of the Port Huron Statement belonged to the first generation raised on television; many of them were enthralled by the moral dramas the SCLC constructed for the nationwide audience. In the early days of the movement, TV coverage usually placed viewers in a position closer to the demonstrators than to the authorities resisting their demands. White middle-class viewers in the North gazed into the steely eyes of state troopers snatching American flags out of the hands of schoolchildren in Jackson, Mississippi, shared the tension as the Freedom Riders--white ministers wearing clerical collars and well-dressed young black men--were swept away by the hurricane of violence in the Birmingham bus station. In her autobiography, Joan Baez describes King's constant awareness that the whole world was watching his every move. Walking beside King during an SCLC-sponsored campaign in Grenada, Mississippi, Baez responded angrily to the crowd harassing the marchers:

They looked particularly pasty, frightened, and unhappy on this day, not at all like a "superior race." I whispered to King, "Martin, what in the hell are we doing? You want these magnificent spirits to be like them?," indicating the miserable little band on the opposite curb. "We must be nuts!" King nodded majestically at an overanxious cameraman, and said out of the corner of his mouth, "Ahem . . . Not while the cameras are rollin'."

The SCLC's most effective use of the media strategy occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, where fire hoses and police dogs deployed against black schoolchildren made a clear moral statement in living rooms and dens throughout white America.

However biased in favor of the movement TV coverage might have seemed to George Wallace or Spiro Agnew--the godfathers of Rush Limbaugh's "liberal media" hallucination--white students seeking the meanings behind the SCLC's carefully orchestrated morality plays found television useless. Many of them turned to folk music, to Baez, Dylan, Phil Ochs ("Talking Birmingham Jam," "Too Many Martyrs (The Ballad of Medgar Evers)," and the devastating satire "Love Me, I'm a Liberal") and Peter, Paul & Mary ("Very Last Day," "If I Had a Hammer," and the hit version of "Blowin' in the Wind"). The folk singers provided the kind of insight the students sought.

Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism

by Geoffrey R. Stone

On April 17, an SDS-sponsored event in Washington drew 20,000 demonstrators. Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, and Judy Collins sang; I. F. Stone, Staughton Lynd, and Senator Ernest Gruening addressed the crowd; and marchers presented proposals at the Capitol calling for an end to the war. In May, more than 20,000 people participated in a marathon teach-in at the University of California at Berkeley. The following month, 18,000 people attended an antiwar rally in Madison Square Garden. An interfaith delegation of Christian and Jewish clergy visited Washington to appeal for peace, and other religious leaders called for a new Geneva conference to bring about an end to the conflict.

[...]

On October 21, 1967, some 6,000 federal marshals and troops gathered in Washington in anticipation of the event. More than 100,000 antiwar demonstrators convened at the Lincoln Memorial to hear speeches and sing protest songs with Phil Ochs and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Dellinger then took the microphone and declared, "[T]his is the beginning of a new stage in the American peace movement in which the cutting edge becomes active resistance." Whether he knew what was about to happen next has never been clear.

The Never-Ending Revival: Rounder Records and the Folk Alliance

By Michael F. Scully

Born in 1954, I was too young to have experienced the revival as it occurred. I came to it in early 1968, in a moment that I recall with great clarity. Walking into the living room of my family's home in Queens, New York City, I saw a guitarist on television singing an explicit antiwar song, a type of song that I had never before heard. "Phil Ochs," said my older sister. At the time, I was a precocious thirteen-year-old with an incipient political consciousness and a developing fascination with the growing anti-Vietnam War movement. I fancied myself a fan of Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, though I knew nothing of the context in which their careers developed, and I did not truly understand Dylan. I had never heard of Ochs but was immediately in awe of him. I quickly purchased his three albums on Elektra Records, which consisted almost entirely of topical songs drawn, as Ochs acknowledged proudly, from the day's headlines.

The song I had heard on television was "I Ain't Marchin' Anymore," from the 1965 album of the same name. By the time I discovered it, the tune had become an antiwar anthem, though neither it nor Ochs had enjoyed anything approaching mainstream success. Like almost every song on those three records, its lyric was a straightfoward expression of Ochs' leftist sociopolitical beliefs. As other albums revelaed, Ochs' art was already moving beyond overt political commentary, but the topical explicitness of his earliest work was perfect, in my case, for educating a teenager ready to embrace the language of leftist "movement culture." I listened to those records virtually nonstop in that tumultuous year, 1968, leading my sister to joke that our neighbors, hearing the subversive sounds emanating from my bedroom window, would surely be calling the FBI. Now, whenever I hear someone pose the insoluble question of whether art can truly mold beliefs, I remember that Ochs' lyrical commitment to humanism, pluralism, and genuine democracy shapes my political value system to this day.