Peter Paul and Mary: Fifty Years in Music and Life - Hardcover

Yarrow, Peter; Stookey, Noel Paul; Travers, Mary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1936140322 ISBN 13: 9781936140329

Publisher: Imagine/Peter Yarrow, 2014

Synopsis

This carefully crafted and collectible volume tells the intimate story of Peter, Paul, and Mary and their music, in their words and with iconic images that follow their passionate, fifty-year journey to the center of America’s heart. Photographs, many rare and never before published, taken over five decades by some of the world’s top photographers, follow them from their earliest performances in the 1960s, when Mary was the most desired, beautiful, and charismatic performer and a new role model for women. Follow the trio as they lead America to discover the passionate soul of folk music. Join the struggle for racial equality, social justice, and freedom in this memorable journey, from the historic 1963 March on Washington with Martin Luther King, Jr., to the trio’s appearance before a half million people in 1969 to end the Vietnam War, to their singing at the Hollywood Bowl for Survival Sunday in 1978, helping to launch the anti-nuke movement, the world’s first international environmental movement.
Through these images, readers will feel and almost hear the trio’s songs calling for a more caring, better world as they performed with a courage and conviction that became for so many the embodiment and soundtrack of their generation’s awakening to conscience, to activism, and to a new dream for all of humankind. Peter, Paul, and Mary’s songs of defiant hope and a certain unmasked innocence are still a powerful part of our American consciousness, and this book reenacts the history of how the trio marked many lives with their indelible stamp of honesty of the sort we all yearn to recapture and recreate today—for ourselves, our children, and the generations to come.

About this title

About the Author

Peter, Paul, and Mary came into being at the dawn of John F. Kennedy’s presidency, as America entered one of its most dramatic periods of social and political change. With music being one of the great forces that brought them together, Americans united in unprecedented ways to create a more just and peaceful society. Folk music, with its ability to reach people’s hearts, became the sound track of this remarkable quest, and Peter, Paul, and Mary became standard-bearers of America’s new hopes and dreams.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I was a college kid on a cold Connecticut night in 1964 when I first heard Mary’s angelic alto. On that night in New Haven and on so many nights over the next five decades, in so many places all over the world, Peter, Paul and Mary’s music asked more of us than to simply sing along. “The hammer of justice” and “the bell of freedom!” These are more than just lyrics; they were then, and they remain, a call to conscience, and as Peter especially has always reminded me, when something pulls at your conscience, you need to act.
            As Peter, Paul and Mary journeyed from coffeehouses and campuses to the Billboard Top 40, there could be no doubt that we were all living in turbulent times. But in their harmonies was a magic and message more powerful than a decade of discord and exhilaration.
            That is why, after all these years, we return to the music. That is why when we turn the pages of this incredible book, we are questioned, liberated, and challenged once again.
            I know my experience with Peter, Paul and Mary is one that I shared with so many in those years of challenge and transformation. Their music became an anchor: “Blowin’ in the Wind” as the war in Vietnam escalated. “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane” as I left to join the war. “Puff, the Magic Dragon” as I patrolled the Mekong Delta. Their songs became the soundtrack of my life and of a generation.
            They changed the cultural fabric of this nation forever. Peter, Paul and Mary brought folk music from the shadows of the McCarthy blacklist era to the living rooms and radio stations of every town in America. They gave the world its first listen to young songwriting talents from Bob Dylan to John Denver, Gordon Lightfoot to Laura Nyro.
            And though their music might stop and the band would break up for years, they never stopped marching. They marched for peace, for racial justice, for workers’ rights. They marched against gun violence, homelessness, and world hunger. They marched for clean air and clean water, against apartheid and nuclear proliferation.
            Through both their songs and their struggle, they helped propel our nation on its greatest journey, on the march toward greater equality. With their passion and persistence, Peter, Paul and Mary helped widen the circle of our democracy.
            It was at Dr. King’s March on Washington, that Peter, Paul and Mary first performed “Blowin’ in the Wind.” On that day and for decades thereafter, they made it clear that it was up to all of us to reach for the answer by reaching out to one another and to the world. Their message was not defined by protest but by taking responsibility—taking the risks that peace, the most powerful answer of all, always requires.
-John F. Kerry, US Secretary of State

About this edition

• Publisher: Imagine/Peter Yarrow
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1936140322
• ISBN 13: 9781936140329
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 144