PETER, PAUL AND MARY

(Peter Yarrow, b. 31 May 1938 in New York City; Paul Stookey, b. 30 December 1937 in Baltimore, Maryland; and Mary Travers, b. 9 November 1936 in Louisville, Kentucky), left-leaning folk music trio who dominated popular music in the early 1960s, singing songs written by Bob Dylan and others and performing frequently at political events.

Mary Allin Travers, the daughter of two newspaper reporters, moved with her parents to New York in 1938 and grew up in Greenwich Village, where she became immersed in the growing folk music scene of the 1950s. In 1955, while still in high school, she became a member of the Song Swappers, a group of eight singers who accompanied the folksinger Pete Seeger on a batch of songs recorded for the expanded version of Talking Union, an album by the Almanac Singers originally recorded in 1941, which was released by Folkways Records. By the start of the 1960s, she was living in Greenwich Village and mingling with other folk musicians in the local clubs, where she met the other members of Peter, Paul and Mary.

Noel Paul Stookey showed an early interest in rhythm and blues and took up the guitar at age eleven. He led rock bands in high school and in college at Michigan State University. After leaving school without earning a degree, he worked as a production manager at a chemical company, but he began spending more and more time in Greenwich Village, where he worked as a singer, comedian, and master of ceremonies. By 1960 he had turned to performing full time.

Peter Yarrow first studied violin and then turned to the guitar. After graduating from New York's High School of Music and Art, he attended Cornell University, graduating in 1959. Initially, he stayed on at the school, working as an assistant instructor in folklore and folk music. By 1960 he was working in Greenwich Village, where his manager Albert Grossman convinced him that he would do better in a group than as a solo performer. Grossman put Yarrow together with Travers and Stookey (who used his middle name so that the group could be called Peter, Paul and Mary, a variant on the line about "I saw Peter, Paul, and Moses / Playing Ring-Around-the-Roses" in the folk song "I Was Born 10,000 Years Ago." They made their debut at Folk City in the fall of 1961.

In January 1962 Peter, Paul and Mary signed to Warner Bros. Records, which released their self-titled debut album in March. Drawn from the album, "Lemon Tree" became a Top Forty singles hit, and the album soared up the charts, eventually hitting number one and selling more than two million copies. A second single, "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)," written by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, made the Top Ten and won Peter, Paul and Mary two Grammy Awards, for best performance by a vocal group and best folk recording. The trio's second album, Moving, released in January 1963, was another chart topper and, like their next four albums, went gold. It featured the enchanting children's novelty song "Puff, the Magic Dragon," a Top Five hit.

In June 1963 Peter, Paul and Mary released their version of Bob Dylan's civil rights anthem "Blowin' in the Wind." It reached the pop Top Five and earned them Grammy Awards in the same two categories they had won in the year before. It also went a long way toward establishing Dylan as a major songwriter. The trio followed with another single written by Dylan, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," a Top Ten hit released in August 1963, the same month that saw the release of their third album, In the Wind, which became their third consecutive number-one album. That same month, on 28 August 1963, they appeared at the celebrated March on Washington, now best remembered for the "I Have a Dream" speech by the civil rights leader Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Between November 1963 and February 1964, there were many weeks when all three Peter, Paul and Mary albums were in the national Top Ten. The emergence of the Beatles and the British invasion of rock groups they led, starting in February 1964, diminished the trio's popularity, but it continued to be widespread for the rest of the decade. In July 1964 they released their double album In Concert, and it became a Top Five hit. The following month they sang "Blowin' in the Wind" at the funeral of Andrew Goodman, one of three men murdered in Mississippi while trying to register blacks to vote.

By 1965 Peter, Paul and Mary were touring internationally. In January their Top Forty single "For Lovin' Me" introduced the songwriter Gordon Lightfoot. It was featured on their Top Ten album A Song Will Rise, released in March. That same month, on 24 March 1965, they joined Dr. King on his march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in support of voting rights. See What Tomorrow Brings, their album released in October 1965, was not as big a hit as its predecessors, but it still made the Top Twenty. By August 1966, when they released The Peter, Paul and Mary Album, they were beginning to follow trends in popular music by adding other instruments to their basic folk approach. Introducing such songwriters as Laura Nyro and John Denver, the album was a Top Forty hit but still marked a sales decline. The group made a commercial comeback in August 1967 with the novelty song "I Dig Rock and Roll Music," written by Stookey, a record on which they affectionately recreated the styles of the Beatles, the Mamas and the Papas, and Donovan. Album 1700, which contained the song, reached the Top Twenty.

By 1967 Peter, Paul and Mary were performing not only at civil rights demonstrations but also at anti–Vietnam War demonstrations, such as the one held in Washington, D.C., on 21 October. Meanwhile, they were growing apart musically; their 1968 album Late Again, which reached the Top Twenty, consisted largely of individual efforts. In 1969 they reached the Top Twenty with Yarrow's elegiac "Day Is Done" and their children's album, Peter, Paul and Mommy, which won the Grammy Award for best children's recording. That fall they enjoyed a surprising hit when their version of John Denver's "Leaving on a Jet Plane," which had appeared on Album 1700 in 1967, was belatedly released as a single and became their only number-one hit.

Ironically, this hit came as the group was ready to split. Stookey's conversion to born-again Christianity added to aspirations for solo work, and Peter, Paul and Mary announced a sabbatical in the fall of 1970. They reunited for a tour and an album in 1978, however, and from 1980 on have been permanently reunited.

There is no biography of Peter, Paul and Mary. The most comprehensive account of their career is the author's, "Peter, Paul and Mary: A Song to Sing All Over This Land," published in Goldmine (12 Apr. 1996), which the group has adopted as its history and reprints on its official website at http://www.peterpaulandmary.com. Also useful are the group-written liner notes to the Reader's Digest triple-CD set Greatest Hits and Finest Performances (1998).

William Ruhlmann