Yarrow: Folk Music Resurgence

Mirrors Society’s Discomfort

Speaking to The Newtown Bee ahead of his headlining set with the Flagpole Radio Café at the Ives Concert Park August 19, folk music icon Peter Yarrow was as passionate about some of the issues plaguing society today as he was during the intense period of civil and social unrest that marked the 1960s, when he and fellow artists Mary Travers and Paul Stookey first rose to prominence.

“To a certain degree, the resurgence of folk music is a function of the imperatives of what is surrounding us — music and speaking out and gathering our hearts together to look at what has truly become a horror, a craziness in our country,” Mr Yarrow said. “Perhaps it’s the perspectives being expressed by the political powers — this huge denial of what we’ve been working for for several generations. Sure we need songs to inform us — songs that become part of the soundtrack of our consciousness. But in the 60s it was matched with reactions and events that affirmed what these songs were saying.”

Peter, Paul and Mary came together during an unusually fertile period in popular music. Mr Yarrow, who had come to Greenwich Village with a psychology degree from Cornell, recalls that “the Village in the early 1960s was a crucible of creativity. Involvement in music was a matter of joyous discovery, not business. We knew that folk music was having an enormous impact in the Village, but was a couple of years away from being embraced on a national scale.”

The group’s self-titled 1962 debut on Warner Bros Records brought folk music of consciousness and concern to the top of the charts. Fueled by the enormous hits “Lemon Tree” and “If I Had a Hammer” the album went straight to #1, remaining in the Billboard Top 10 for 10 months and in the Top 20 for two years on the way to a remarkable three-and-a-half year run on the album chart.

In 1963, the trio released the LPs Moving and In The Wind, which hit #2 and #1, respectively, and continued to hold Top 20 positions alongside the first album.

This success marked the beginning of an incredibly fertile and influential time for the group, and for the contemporary urban folk tradition they personified. Their commercial high water mark occurred in the third week of November 1963 — the very week President Kennedy was assassinated — when they held three of the top six positions on Billboard’s album chart.

That same year, their recording of “Puff (The Magic Dragon),” co-written by Mr Yarrow and Leonard Lipton, won the hearts of millions, and went on to be an enduring children’s classic.

“‘Puff (The Magic Dragon)’ became metaphorical for a certain spirit because of its proximity to the era of idealism and hope in the 60s,” Mr Yarrow said in a band biography. “If it had been written in a time of cynicism and selfishness such as this one, perhaps ‘Puff’ might not have resonated in the same way, save for those who were bemoaning the loss of innocence of their own time.”

Meanwhile, their recording of “Blowin’ in the Wind” helped introduce a fellow Village songwriter named Bob Dylan.

July 2011 marked the release of a DVD concert of a 1986 Peter, Paul and Mary 25th anniversary PBS TV special. This recent DVD release commemorates the 50th anniversary of the formation of the group. Thinking back across the legacy he helped create, Mr Yarrow said that it was so often about finding the right song to motivate people to come together, to sing together, and to act as a collective agent of change — something he still hopes to inspire through his current performances including the upcoming show in Danbury with the Flagpole Radio Café.

“Just the very act of coming together and singing together is an affirmation that we can share a closeness, and proves there is a goodness in all of us,” Yarrow said. “Today we are a nation with a very injured heart — mean spiritedness on a massive scale, bullying, cruelty, and competition rather than cooperation. The music I’ve been singing all these years, that have resonated with other cultures from the troubadours to the slaves and the labor unions, it’s setting a blaze that reaches the hearts of all Americans and feeds the basic desire to be good that existed in the 1960s and is still very much alive within us today.”