Medford mail tribune., August 25, 1963, Image 39

MORE THAN 10,000 persons left a
large Eastern stadium on a recent
summer night. Most were college types
with a sprinkling of well-dressed teen
agers and a few "older people" 30ish,
you know.
They had just heard a concert, but from the
peevish arguing it might well have been a closely
fought football game or heated political rally.
The music, however, was folk, and it is some
times difficult to determine which folk-music
fanatics enjoy most, listening to it or debating it.
"Peter, Paul, and Mary? Bah, strictly com
mercial. Songs aren't from the people, not grass
roots. Just a good show-biz trio put together
by a booking agent!"
That is a folk-music argument not only about
Peter, Paul, and Mary but about many of the
new faces and new sounds in the oldest of musi
cal genres. Folk music started catching on more
than a decade ago, but until recently the public
was satisfied with traditional singers Burl Ives,
the Weavers, Josh White and traditional songs
passed down through generations from Eliza
bethan England, Appalachia America, and other
national or ethnic groups.
Nowadays, though, the public can't get enough
of the music, so innovators both in style and con
tent have come on the scene. With them has come
the "purist-versus-popular" debate at teen-agers'
soda fountains, college rathskellers, and in the
big-city coffeehouses.
In mcny ways, Peter, Paul, and Mary typify
the focal point of the discussion and the "new
look." In the No. 1 musical fad, they rank No. 1
in popularity with such hits as "Puff, the Magic
Dragon" (written by Peter), "The Lemon Tree,"
and "Five Hundred Miles." But a highly articu
late and intelligent trio, they don't need their
millions of fans to defend them. If Mary's win
some charm and Paul's comic flair can't win you
over, Peter's polysyllabic dissertations will over
whelm you:
"T71 OLK Music is communicable emotion al
1 lowing the audience to participate in a
richly rewarding interpersonal relationship with
the performer, rather than remain spectators
. . . Yes, we translate songs into terms of to
day but without destroying their feelings. Folk
music has always undergone in transmission cer
tain mutations . . . Ethnic groups, for in
stance, lost individual fusion in America's cul
ture because of the dispersion of common -ideas
through communications; their music, too,
changed, but essential authenticity remained."
In other words, Mary says, "We sing for the
times. Folk singers always have been contem
porary and popular balladeers, minstrels, street
singers. They made the music fit the time and
audience. So do we."
Paul adds: "There are 'reporters' who bring
a tape recorder into the mountains to capture
an age-old song, then sing it almost exactly as
the mountaineers sang it. They are 'reporters'
and good ones. But we are interpreters, creators.
We believe in doing more than imitating."
What the purists sometimes overlook is the
fact that while Peter, Paul, and Mary ha-e
brought something new to folk singing, they are
not newcomers themselves. They learned the rules
of their art before tampering with them.
As the precocious son of a New York City at-
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Are They Really
"FOLK
SINGERS"
?
The purists say no,
the public says yes,
and it all makes
for a box-office boom
By JACK RYAN
torney and schoolteacher, Peter Yarrow's interest
in music was so great his mother had to discour
age it. "She wanted me to go out and play ball
but I wanted only to play the violin," Peter says.
"I began playing the guitar in high school be
cause everybody else did, but it wasn't until I got
to Cornell University that I discovered I was a
good folk singer.
"On one occasion, Josh White was late for a
concert, and I filled in. This gave me a chance
to compare my performance with that of a pro
fessional. The result was not unfavorable to me.
Later I left Cornell and got my first job in a
Greenwich Village coffeehouse by simply telling
the manager I could make money for him. I did."
Paul Stookey's father was a salesman who
often took his wife and son on road trips. To
pass the time, Mr. Stookey would sing. One day
little Paul joined in in perfect harmony, although
he'd never heard harmony. "My dad wasn't es
pecially musical, but he gave me my first guitar,
and we'd sing together. When I started writing
songs, my mother, a writer, would be my critic."
PAUL performed in high school and at the Uni
versity of Michigan and organized a rock V
roll band for tours. After college he settled in
New York City as a young business executive who
visited the Village for coffeehouse chess games.
One night, almost on impulse, he asked the man
ager if he needed entertainers. The answer was
yes, and soon Paul was performing nightly and
dragging himself to work during the day. "I had
to decide on entertaining or business. It was en
tertaining." Soon he was appearing with such
headliners as Joan Baez and doing comedy at a
good salary in Village clubs.
Mary Allin Travers first remembers singing on
a Louisville picket line when she was five. Both
her parents were newspaper workers who later
moved to Greenwich Village, where kids sang
folk music instead of playing hopscotch. "Every
Sunday I'd take my collie to Washington Square,
where everybody sang. I would have little wars
trying to outsing them. I knew Josh White's kids,
and I'd go home with them after school and dig
the whole folk scene. In high school I sang with
Pete Seeger and made three records with him."
She was a "victim of progressive education,"
however, and seemed lost in young adulthood.
Friends literally dragged her to a Broadway try
out, where she won a job in a short-lived musical.
This brought an offer for a folk-singing job but,
because she couldn't play the guitar, the manager
called in a partner. He was Paul Stookey.
About this time Peter Yarrow was looking for
a girl singing partner, and Al Grossman, one of
the behind-the-scenes masterminds of the folk
singing business, suggested Mary. The result was
not a duo but Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Despite new riches, Peter still lives with his
mother in the Manhattan apartment he grew up
in. Mary, divorced and the mother of a three-year-old
daughter, Erica, lives in an expensive
East Side apartment and buys clothes at the ex
clusive shop where she was once a switchboard
operator. Paul, ban vivant of the group, also has
elaborate "diggings" and an even more stylish
wardrobe than when he shocked Village beatniks
by appearing in Brooks Brothers apparel.
All three appear totally undisturbed by success
("I'm not a star," says Mary indignantly, "I'm
a folk singer!") or the controversy they excite.
They are doing what they like best and, more
important, what audiences like best.
Family Weekly, August 25, 1963