Near the end of A Completely Unknown, the 1965 biopic centering on Bob Dylan's transition into rock, a serious, slim, bearded, and clearly nervous MC says that Dylan has three plugs. He struggles to appease a deeply divided audience who have just heard him sing. Songs from the Newport Folk Festival. If you're a baby boomer, you'll instantly recognize Peter Yarrow as the MC. He himself headlines the festival with his folk revival trio Peter, Paul & Mary.
Yarrow, who died Tuesday at age 86, was also a member of the Newport Folk Festival's board of directors, and was instrumental in balancing the event's founding mission to bring traditional music to a broader audience with more appealing audience tastes. I was trying to take it. More pop than purism. Among festival organizers, Yarrow was an advocate of topical songwriting and a modern sound that some older folk enthusiasts resisted. (According to “White Bicycles'' by Joe Boyd, a producer who ran a sound system in Newport in 1965, Yarrow also took control during Bob Dylan's loud and divisive electric set. ) and, in the early, idealistic days of the folk revival, Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey, Mary Travers (2009 ) strummed and harmonized. Their method aims for a sensible balance between folk and pop. It was sincere and fleeting.
Peter, Paul and Mary — Stookey performed by his Biblical middle name — hit America's cultural sweet spot in the early 1960s. They achieved radio hits and No. 1 albums by beautifully arranging folk songs and smoothing out the protest material of Dylan and Pete Seeger. They also made their politics clear by singing for civil rights at the 1963 March on Washington, and by singing anti-war songs with older songs such as “Brutal War” and “If I Had My Way.” , brought out the anti-establishment subtext.
Meanwhile, Yarrow wrote the lilting and enduring nursery rhyme “Puff (Magic Dragon),” using lyrics given to him by a college acquaintance, and addressed something he had always claimed was a misconception: about smoking marijuana. Since it was a song, it brought immeasurable benefits.
Like pop groups before and since, the trio was a calculated project in which manager Albert Grossman envisioned the commercial potential of a one-woman, two-man folkie harmony group. He had approached other Greenwich Village figures, among them Dave Van Ronk and Carolyn Hester, before the trio line-up went viral in 1961.
Peter, Paul and Mary set out in supper clubs and concert halls to perform clean-cut, meticulously arranged folk songs inherited from 1950s groups such as the Weavers and the Kingston Trio. It quickly emerged as the winner of the 1960s approach.
The group emerged as a sophisticated and showy representative of the 1960s village folk scene. On the cover of their self-titled 1962 debut album, Yarrow and Stookey pose against the brick wall of the Bitter End Club, wearing Brooks Brothers suits and matching goatees. Elijah Wald's book “Dylan Goes Electric!'' points out that the New Yorker's nightlife list from the early 1960s simply described them as “Two Beards and a Doll.''
Peter, Paul and Mary's sound was never raw or unplanned. It was complex and ornamental, usually supporting just three voices, two guitars, and a modestly jazzy bass fiddle. The vocal parts were carefully rehearsed, with the three singers exchanging leads and backing each other with carefully planned dynamics. Their voices achieved a special blend, with Yarrow's tenor nestled neatly between Stookey's baritone and Travers' contralto, a trio of reeds.
Yarrow's own actions were not as kind as those of his group. In 1970, he pleaded guilty to lewd acts against a minor and was sentenced to prison. He served just under three months in prison and was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1981. “In this regard,” he told The New York Times in 2019.
Peter, Paul and Mary's music was a far cry from the rawness and spontaneity (and often songwriting credits) of their traditional sources. In retrospect, the trio's sound is closer to the chamber pop of the late 1960s, the predecessors of the Mamas and the Papas, the Association, and Simon and Garfunkel. But at the time, they were a bridge from the sometimes grungy folk scene to national pop access. They had Top 10 radio hits with Seger's “If I Had a Hammer” and Dylan's “Blowin' in the Wind” and “Don't Think Twice, It's Alright.” These were crucial to Dylan's career, but his own versions lasted just as long.
Folk rock and psychedelia made Peter, Paul & Mary sound pale and precious, but nostalgia sustained them throughout their subsequent reunion career. But in the early 1960s, they were the group of the moment. The roar of the motorcycle lying in front of me had sophisticated and classy training wheels on it.
