Volume 26, Number 1 April 2004
What do CTA and Peter, Paul and Mary have in common?
by Laura Blumenkemper-Grindstaff
Folk music had its heyday in the 1960s. Yet Peter, Paul, and Mary, folk icons in the ’60s, continue to make their music in concert halls, and people from babies to great-grandparents fill the seats. I wasn’t born until 1965, yet folk music stirs my soul. Why is folk music still so powerful?
I went to a Peter, Paul and Mary concert late last fall, and got to interview Paul — Noel Paul Stookey — for CTA News. “Folk music has two aspects,” he said. “Participation, not just by the musicians but also by the audience; and advocacy—an articulation of concerns that transcend entertainment.” He went on: “A folk song typically has a lot of lyrics. Audiences have to be with it enough to digest an overload of information.” So, argues Stookey, the applause after a folksong isn’t simply for the artistry of the musicians. It says, ‘We agree with what you just said.’ Or, an uncomfortable silence or even occasional boos show the pain of our nation’s unresolved problems that surface as a song is sung.
Because of the issues, folk music is inherently political. Whose thoughts do not turn political with “We Shall Overcome” or “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?” But the songs are much more than political. When an entire concert hall sings along, or a group standing in protest on a street sings together, there is spiritual power. Stookey said, “Maybe politics is broader than just voting or fingerpointing. Maybe it’s about fighting the Mother Teresa battles, about loving.”
Folk music has always had a spiritual side. Whether an African-American spiritual or an Appalachian lament, God has been a part of many folk songs and respect of the human spirit is part of all folk. In the ’60s a new branch of spiritual folk music called the Folk Mass grew in the Catholic Church. Sr. Miriam Therese Winter and Ray Repp were two of the more prolific Catholic songwriters. I tracked each of them down for interviews. Winter said her songs were attempts to replicate in English the kind of thematic response to the Word found originally in Gregorian Chant. Repp said he wrote songs from his own spiritual and human reflection on scripture and the Church. Both wanted songs to be easy to sing and play, encouraging participation from the people, a priority of Vatican II. And both credit the sound of Peter, Paul, and Mary as an influence on their music. I asked Paul Stookey to comment. “Peter, Paul, and Mary gave the concept of two guitars and many voices a credibility for good musical communicating,” he said. “Before Peter, Paul, and Mary started playing, only a handful of performers, mainly black, did street guitar music.”
Times change, but the issues remain largely the same: unionization and jobs, the morality of a war, intolerance on a host of levels, and greed running wild. Peter, Paul, and Mary’s latest CD, In These Times, offers songs as fresh and crisp as the morning’s newspaper. With our nation’s current direction, folk musicians still have a torrent of stories to write about. With the pain and polarity in society, we need to gather together and experience the healing power of song. Folk music continues its vital role, uniting, and sustaining humanity in all. As the trio's Peter Yarrow said in a PBS documentary, “You don’t have to reinvent folk music. You just have to carry it on.”