My Conversation with Peter Yarrow (the Peter in Peter, Paul and Mary)

Peter, Paul and Mary were (L-R) Paul Stookey, Mary Travers and Peter Yarrow

Here’s another interview from the archive of the podcast I created in Japan around 10 years ago called The American Radio Show, on which I tried to tap into some of the cultural wealth that passes through Japan, mostly invisibly because the Japanese media is pretty much monolingual.

I interviewed astronaut Naoko Yamazaki, movie producer and director Roger Corman, actor and political activist George Takei, composer Philip Glass, jazz musicians Gregory Porter, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Jack DeJohnette; U.S. Ambassador to Japan John Roos; Pritzker Prize-winning architect Fumihiko Maki, and a bunch of others.

I started out thinking I would interview only visiting Americans, and I got funding from the U.S. Embassy Tokyo to support the project, but then I had opportunities to speak with people like Naoko Yamazaki, and I expanded my brief to “people with a connection to the U.S.A.”; Naoko had, of course, trained with NASA in Houston for years, and she knew what a Hostess Twinkie was. Fumihiko Maki had studied at Harvard, and worked at Washington University in St. Louis (but I’m not sure he knows what a Twinkie is).

Today’s post is an interview with musician Peter Yarrow, a founder of the folk music trio Peter, Paul and Mary, which may be best-known for their hit “Puff the Magic Dragon”.

I hope you find it interesting, and thanks for reading! Subscribing is free, so please feel free to forward to anyone you think may also be interested.

Like a Brazilian football player, folk musician Peter Yarrow is best known by only one name. He’s the Peter in Peter, Paul and Mary, one of the iconic music groups of the 1960s, whose songs sold millions of copies and provided the soundtrack to the protest movements of that era.

The group’s hits included Puff the Magic Dragon, If I Had a Hammer and Blowing in the Wind, and although Mary Travers died in 2009, Yarrow and bandmate Paul Stookey continued to play the group’s music together, as well as pursue separate musical careers.

In 2000, Yarrow founded Operation Respect, an organization that works to fight bullying and violence in schools and that has reached hundreds of thousands of children and educators all over the world with its message.

I met Yarrow in Tokyo right after he had released a new song, Never Give Up, adapted from a poem written by the Dalai Lama and aimed at combating bullying and harassment in schools; we talked at length about his music career, as well as his campaign to halt bullying. Here’s our conversation:

Q. I want to start by asking you the most basic question imaginable: what is folk music?

PY. A scholar would say it’s music that’s produced in a homogeneous cultural indigenous setting in which the lives and perspectives of people in that setting are revealed. Their hopes, their dreams, their lives, their tragedies. A scholar would also say it’s generally anonymously written, passed down through the aural tradition, and belonging to the people.

Today, nearly all music incorporates a wide range of influences, so it’s not quite the same as the original folk music, but you can still find some elements. For example, it’s not so commercial, not so focused on trying to get to number one on the charts. It’s written to celebrate what’s in people’s hearts, to offer a sense of history, and to allow listeners to follow the music back through their own experiences in life.

So that’s what we’ve been doing, Peter, Paul and Mary, all of these years. We’ve learned from Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and The Weavers something that combines their music with a dream and a hope and a value system. And that is why folk music is so connected to social and political efforts.

Q. How did you get your start in music? How did you become a musician, and how did you become a folk musician?

PY. When I was growing up, there was a music that expressed various progressive concerns, such as inequality, that were at issue at the time. And I was raised by my mother, who was that kind of progressive. She was a single mother who was a teacher of English speech and drama, and she valued learning, she valued culture. So she would take me to concerts. She had records at home.

Simply by giving me the options, she opened up my perspectives. We never had much money, but there was money for music lessons, to buy a guitar, to see gifted artists. That was her value system and that’s why I was encouraged to take up these opportunities.

I never planned to become a professional musician, but I was at one of the “Fame” schools in New York City, high schools of the performing arts, and I loved it. Then I went to Cornell University, which I hated, for its establishment atmosphere. But I got a job as a teaching assistant for a folk music course, and I saw that the students had other interests than graduating and making money. And I felt that singing folk songs together had revealed this.

So when I graduated I went to Greenwich Village, and started singing, and Albert Grossman asked to manage me, and then he had an idea to form a group. We worked on that, and seven months later Peter, Paul and Mary played at The Bitter End, and the rest was history.

Q. The first original song sung by Peter, Paul and Mary was Puff the Magic Dragon, right?

PY. Well, almost right. The first album that we did had songs on it such as If I Had a Hammer, Lemon Tree, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? And that album had quite a lot of success and was up near the top of the charts. The second album had Puff the Magic Dragon on it. The music had shifted from popular music to music that had become the soundtrack of the consciousness of the change that was going on in America, and our music was a bridge for many people to the music of Bob Dylan, for example.

Puff the Magic Dragon was just a kids song. But I had no idea it would become so successful. When we sang Blowing in the Wind, Bob Dylan was unheard of. He’d recorded a demo of that song, but that was it. The same for Leaving on a Jet Plane by John Denver and In the Early Morning Rain, by Gordon Lightfoot. We recorded songs based on a different process from that used in commercial music. We recorded songs that really got to us, that moved us, that reached our hearts. The success was a result of that. You can’t reduce the success of the music of the 60s to a formula involving arrangements and musical presentation. It was a matter of finding the songs, and going to the heart of the songs, and then creating something that we really wanted to share.

Today, music has become so commercialized and so commodified and so monetized, and I don’t think there’s anything today that compares to the folk music was produced in the 60s in terms of moving people. There are plenty of good young folk musicians – I hear plenty of them every year at the Kerrville Folk Music Festival, which I helped to found – but they don’t have the audience we had back then.

Q. Do you think that music has the power to drive social change, or is it the soundtrack to social change?

PY. I think it’s interactive. I think there’s the predisposition on the part of those who are committed to social change that allows them to be moved and united by a piece of music. And that creates a further affirmation that other artists can write songs, with the intention to reach those people as well. I think that both things happen.

Q. I want to ask you about the reason you’re in Japan this week. It was in 1999 you founded Operation Respect?

PY. Actually it was before that. I had to record the song and create the curricula, but by 1999 we had the pieces in place. In the United States there’s a focus on academic success, and the emotional and social aspects of education were being neglected. If you neglect those things you don’t get people who think with their hearts, and who have the capacity to grow in a healthy way. The goal was not just to eliminate bullying, but also to create an environment for children in which they felt safe, cared for, nurtured and loved, in which they could focus. When you’re afraid, you can’t learn.

This is the main focus of my life, and if you think about it, the absence of respect is the reason that we marched, back in the 60s. The March on Washington was about racism, a form of disrespect. The women’s movement, the environmental movement, these were responses to disrespect. So Operation Respect is an extension of and builds on those other efforts, except that it focuses on children, rather than trying to mobilize adults. Because it’s my believe that adults are stuck. They’re stuck with their preconceptions. They’ve going to defend what they’ve lived. How are you going to break out of that? By educating a new generation that’s going to reject that. A new generation of kids that has empathy and compassion.

Q. So what does Operation Respect do?

PY. We operate in a lot of different areas. We have a program called “Don’t Laugh at Me” that is in 22,000 schools in America. It is in many countries outside of America. We’re known as an anti-bullying and violence organization, but we’re more than that. For example, after the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, I was asked by the town to organize a concert there, to help the townspeople to try to turn their grief into something positive. I don’t understand why civilians should be permitted to own automatic weapons, or even handguns, for that matter, but that’s my perspective and I don’t expect everyone to share that.

However, just getting rid of guns doesn’t solve the problem. You have to get rid of the cultural approval of injury to others. Right now we live in an extraordinarily violent society in the United States, and frankly, there is a version of that here in Japan, which is why we are here. It has a different face, and a different context, but suicide among young people occurs at double the rate it does in the United States, and it all depends on the kind of humanity that surrounds kids when they are brought up.

We now have a culture that is titillated by the bully. We are talking about a culture that has lost its soul, its empathy, its compassion. The world has changed. Kids are afraid to go to school, afraid to raise their hands. I know because I’m in this business, but today’s bullying is worlds away from the bullying that went on in the past. This is a crisis of materialism, of a wrong value system.

Q. What’s the solution, then, for kids specifically?

PY. If the environment in the school is loving and caring. If the kids feel secure there, if they feel valued. If they feel that they have a say in their own destiny there. If they’re not being fed educational perspectives that are de facto teaching to the test so they’ll do well on high stakes tests. If these kids are not in frightening environments that force them to walk through metal detectors, well, then they won’t want to be there. And I go to schools like that all the time.

If you create a positive environment in the school, that’s what will change it. It’s not going to change things immediately, but ultimately it will change things. That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. I believe that if we create a positive environment for kids, we will save the world. I believe that if we don’t, we’re headed in the wrong direction.

Q. What feedback do you get in Asia when you suggest that the single test on which your whole life pivots is not producing the best people? Is it possible to effect change?

PY. We’re doing a lot of work in Hong Kong, where I have met with every educator there. It’s not a large place. But there’s a tremendous amount of interest. In the United States, I formed an organization called United Voices for Education. A coalition of 42 groups of teachers, school administrators and school counselors. And they spent six months trying to decide what they might do together that they could not achieve individually, and they decided that what we needed to do is shift the focus of education away from the “teaching to the test” paradigm and toward something we call “Whole Child Education”. That goes hand in hand with creating an environment that is caring and loving and supportive of a child who is trying to learn. The current system is creating human beings without humanity.

I think if we want peace, we have to nurture the peace that’s within the children. It doesn’t happen because you talk about it. In that poem by the Dalai Lama that I set to music, he says, “Never give up. No matter the pain and sorrow. You’ll find your tomorrow. Your compassionate heart it will lead you. Your loving heart, it will free you. Never give up.” What does His Holiness have to say about this? He’s saying that this next century will be the century of compassion. Right now it doesn’t look like it at all. I don’t think we’re going to persuade the leaders. I think they’re stuck. But I do think that if we can educate the children, we have a chance.