Peter, Paul and Mary’s music and social activism helped to shape a generation. Through the years, the popular and inspirational folk trio who frequently sang out against war and injustice touched the hearts and consciences of millions of people worldwide, won five Grammy Awards, received eight gold and five platinum records, released six Billboard top 10 singles, had two #1 Billboard chart-topping albums and a dozen top 40 hits, and have been the subject of five PBS documentaries.

Peter Yarrow was born on May 31, 1938 in New York City. Although he took violin lessons as a child, inspired by folks like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, he later switched to guitar. After graduating from Cornell University in 1959 with a degree in Psychology (although he also was a teaching assistant in an American folklore class), Yarrow returned to NYC and began playing the folk clubs and basket houses of Greenwich Village. After meeting music impresario Albert Grossman (who managed Dylan, Janis Joplin, Odetta, and others) who was eager to work with a folk harmony group, Yarrow set about with Grossman to launch one.

Peter, Paul and Mary – featuring Yarrow (guitar and tenor vocals), Noel Paul Stookey’s (guitar and gentle baritone vocals) and Mary Travers’ (contralto vocals) — formed in 1961, having made its first public appearance that fall at the Bitter End on Bleecker Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The trio’s eponymous debut album, released on Warner Brothers Records in May 1962, topped the charts that summer, remained in the Billboard magazine top 10 for ten months and the top 20 for two years, sold more than two-million copies, and featured the Grammy Award-winning hit single, “If I Had a Hammer.” That song, penned by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays of The Weavers (whom Yarrow viewed as early mentors), became an anthem of the civil rights movement and was performed by the trio on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, along with its rendition of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” during the historic 1963 March on Washington at which the late Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Peter, Paul and Mary’s rendition of “ Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” was released in the summer of 1963 and also became a big hit for the trio. Archival footage of the trio performing the song during the march appears in the 2014 PBS documentary 50 Years with Peter, Paul and Mary, produced and directed by Emmy Award-winner Jim Brown. As Yarrow observes in the documentary, it was time when “music began to inspire America, tweak its conscience, and articulate its dreams.”

Besides “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the trio also recorded Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In” and Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” with its rendition of the latter song also landing in Billboard’s top 10. Yarrow served on the board of the Newport Folk Festival and helped to emcee the event in 1965 when Dylan went electric. Famously, as recreated in the widely acclaimed Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown that is currently screening at movie theaters, Dylan borrowed Yarrow’s guitar to play “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”

Although Peter, Paul and Mary performed together over the span of 50 years, there were times when the trio was on hiatus with each of its members pursuing solo careers and projects. The first such break came in 1970, shortly after the release of the trio’s cover of John Denver’s “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane” and Yarrow’s conviction after pleading guilty to taking “indecent liberties” with an under-age girl who had come to his dressing room seeking an autograph in 1969, for which he served three months in prison.

While “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane” was its last number one hit, Yarrow penned “Light One Candle” for the trio in 1982 – while war was raging in Lebanon – that has since become a popular Chanukah song. Peter, Paul and Mary performed “Light One Candle” — whose lyrics commemorate a war of national liberation fought by the Maccabees, while also calling for peace in the Middle East – for several years before recording it on its 1986 studio album No Easy Walk to Freedom. Its moving lyrics include: “Light one candle for the terrible sacrifice justice and freedom demand. Light one candle for the wisdom to know when the peacemaker’s time is at hand.” The 1986 album’s title track is a civil rights anthem that Yarrow co-wrote with Margery Tabankin.

An anti-war activist, Yarrow helped to organize and produce a number of large events including peace concerts at NYC’s Madison Square Garden and Shea Stadium, as well as the 1969 “Celebration of Life” march and demonstration in Washington, DC during which some 500,000 people demanded an end to America’s involvement in Vietnam.

Yarrow was a major champion of other songwriters who particularly sought to nurture the talents of new and emerging ones who, as he put it, “write from the heart.” A founding board member of the Newport Folk Festival, he also developed and hosted a Sunday afternoon concert focused on emerging folk artists and songwriters – providing earl opportunities to such artists as Eric Anderson, Tim Hardin and Buffy St. Marie. Ten years later, in 1972, he partnered with Rod Kennedy, the late founder-producer of the Kerrville Folk Festival to establish what’s now the Grassy Hill Kerrville New Folk Competition for Emerging Songwriters. The Kerrville New Folk Concerts have become a highlight of the annual festival that is geared towards singer-songwriters of various musical styles and is the longest continuously running festival of its kind in North America.

Yarrow believed that music could be a transformative tool for informing the ethical sensibilities of children. In 1999, he established Operation Respect — an educational nonprofit organization and program that seeks to teach children about tolerance and respect for each other’s differences – using music, video, and conflict resolution curricula developed by Educators for Social Responsibility. In an interview with AcousticMusicScene.com in 2010, Yarrow maintained that “all kids deserve to grow up accepting each other,” expressing concern that 160,000 American children refuse to go to school because of cruelty, according to the American Association of School psychologists. Citing “our need to inherit a peaceful world,” he noted that peace education was regarded as “seditious” when the Operation Respect program was launched. It has since been incorporated into the curriculum of some 22,000 U.S. elementary and middle schools.

A former board member of the Connecticut Hospice, where he also periodically sang for patients and staff, he was long active on behalf of the hospice movement.

Last April, Yarrow joined Stookey in in performing in Boston during a Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Peter, Paul and Mary were among the inaugural class of inductees.

As Yarrow told AcousticMusicScene.com in 2010: “”Music can be used as a powerful force in a world where we desperately need it … Music is something that binds the hearts and can bring us together.” Here’s a link to read that article: https://acousticmusicscene.com/2010/11/27/the-peter-yarrow-sing-along-special-airs-on-pbs-stations/

Many of Peter Yarrow’s songs and those by other songwriters that Peter, Paul and Mary covered over the decades have a timeless quality to them and multigenerational appeal. For Peter Yarrow, “Day is Done,” yet his music and that of Peter, Paul and Mary lives on. So too do his widow Mary Beth (the niece of the late Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-MN), whom he met during a 1968 Democratic presidential primary campaign event and married the following year), his daughter Bethany, son Christopher, granddaughter Valentina, and lots of adoring fans.

Our folk community mourns his passing, as well as the recent deaths of Mike Brewer (a Missouri-based folk-rock singer-songwriter who, with his musical partner Tom Shipley, recorded the hit song “One Toke Over the Line”), David Mallet (the Maine-based singer-songwriter best known for “Garden Song”), and Josh White, Jr. (a Michigan-based singer and guitarist who followed in his late father’s folk and blues footsteps for decades).

Kniss began performing with Peter, Paul and Mary in 1964 and became bassist for John Denver in the 1970s when the legendary folk trio stopped touring regularly. After an eight-year stint with Denver, during which he also co-wrote songs with him, Kniss resumed performing with a reunited Peter, Paul & Mary in 1978 and continued to do so until Mary Travers’ death in 2009. Over the years, Kniss, a self-taught musician, also played with such jazz greats as Herbie Hancock, Woody Herman, Donald Byrd and Zoot Sims.

Kniss was “our intrepid bass player for almost as long as we performed together,” said Peter Yarrow in a statement reported by The Associated Press. “He was a dear and beloved part of our closest family circle, and his bass playing was always a great fourth voice in our music as well as, conceptually, an original and delightfully surprising new statement added to our vocal arrangements.”

Reflecting on Kniss, Noel Paul Stookey has noted that the late bassist continually re-invented approaches to Peter, Paul & Mary’s songs and said “I can’t name another bass player who improvises so tastefully within the framework of folk music.” Stookey recently told The New York Times: “In folk music, we’re telling a story. The guitars would begin it, but Dick was an orchestrator, and his entry often signified a particular turning point in a song.”

After 27 years as a staple of the station’s Sunday evening programming, the show ends its run on April 24. Blackman’s last two programs will be devoted to some of the artists and albums that have particularly influenced his love of folk music over the decades. Blackman hosts a special four-hour program as part of WKAR Radio’s spring fundraising drive on April 17, while his final show airs a week later.

“Those two shows will be my last chance to pay homage to the artists who first got me interested in folk music in the sixties and seventies,” says Blackman. “I started with Peter, Paul and Mary, Tom Paxton, and Pete Seeger, so they’ll certainly be on those shows. And I’ll include other artists who became favorites along the way, like the Red Clay Ramblers, the Bothy Band, Stan Rogers, Peter Ostroushko, Eva Cassidy, and as many more as I can squeeze into those final programs.”

In a recent post to folk dj-l, a listserv for folk radio hosts for which he serves as one of the volunteer administrators, Blackman acknowledged that “Many, many faves will still have to be left out, unfortunately, but I’ll try to pick out a few dozen of them for those two shows.” His last “regular” show aired on April 10.

Blackman, whose interest in radio was stirred while he was a morning announcer and part of the “DJ Club” at East Lansing High School, playing records over a PA system at lunchtime, joined WKAR as host of The American Tradition in 1974. After producing 45 half-hour shows, he left the area to pursue graduate studies in folklore at Indiana University. Blackman later returned to his hometown and, in early 1977, launched The Folk Tradition for its initial four-year run. His Sunday evening show debuted in March 1984. Besides airing locally in Michigan, beginning at 6 p.m., it streams on Folk Alley (and via WKAR’s website) with encores at 11 p.m. on Sunday, 1 p.m. on Monday, and 8 p.m. on Tuesday.

“Although I’m retiring from doing this show, I still love folk music and plan to continue all of my other activities in the local arts community,” says Blackman. He’s been an emcee and advisor to the Ten Pound Fiddle coffeehouse in East Lansing that he co-founded more than 35 years ago, as well as the Great Lakes Folk Festival that takes place each August. Blackman also has spoken on folk and bluegrass music at local libraries and been a music consultant for local theatrical productions. A founding member of Folk Alliance International, who has been a moderator or panelist at several of its annual conferences, Blackman also has written for Sing Out! and other music publications. He has also written liner notes for albums by Stan Rogers, Michigan’s own Joel Mabus and Sara Grey.

Beginning next month, The Folk Tradition on WKAR-FM will be replaced by Folk Alley, a two-hour program hosted by Jim Blum from WKSU in Kent, Ohio. While acknowledging that he’s never met Blum, Blackman, who helped the station’s management evaluate possible replacements,” said: “Of all the programs we auditioned, I think Jim’s musical taste and on-air style were the closest to my own… I’ve really enjoyed his work on the Folk Alley webstream, and the more I learn about him, the more it feels like we’re kindred spirits in a lot of ways.”

Loving tributes and remembrances from Peter and Paul appear at www.marytravers.com.