Song Lyric of the Day (Patty Griffin, on ‘The Love You Leave’)

“The love you leave on earth goes round forever.”—American singer-songwriter Patty Griffin and David Pulkingham, “A Word,” from Griffin’s CD Crown of Roses (2025)

Congratulations to Ms. Griffin for her Best Folk Album Grammy nomination for Crown of Roses.

This Day in Music History (Mary Travers, Golden Center of ’60s Folk Hitmakers, Dies)

Sept. 16, 2009— Mary Travers, a willowy blonde whose soaring soprano and liberal-left politics helped lift the vocal trio Peter, Paul and Mary and a generation of folk music singer-songwriters onto the top of the charts and into the heart of the civil-rights and antiwar movements, died at age 72 in Danbury, CT, of side effects from chemotherapy for leukemia.

As I write this, Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris led Donald Trump first to speculate that the singer-songwriter might “pay a price for it…in the marketplace,” then to post, in all caps, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” on Truth Social. 

In a sense, Swift is the spiritual descendant of Travers—who, like fellow trio members Peter Yarrow and Noel (Paul) Stookey, was an outspoken social activist—and, unlike Swift, advocated relentlessly on multiple issues.

PPM’s 1963 cover version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” for instance, almost instantly became an anthem of the civil-rights movement, and brought his literate, serious songs to the attention of a public that at the time was buying softer pop fare like Lesley Gore’s “Judy’s Turn to Cry.”

This Kentucky native came to Greenwich Village as a child with her mother. A newspaper reporter and single parent, Virginia Travers had little time to spend with Mary, but left her with an important bit of advice—beware the thin line between compromise and complicity—and with an unexpected adult female role model: an African-American friend who often took Mary into her Harlem home on weekends, where the young girl developed an acute understanding of racial inequality.

Though in high school she joined the Song Swappers, which sang backup for Pete Seeger on several recordings, her initial diffidence about performing left her at loose ends on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1960s until Bob Dylan's aggressive manager Albert Grossman decided to manufacture his own counterpart to the all-male Kingston Trio—only with the svelte Travers to provide sex appeal in combination with the goateed Yarrow and Stookey.

Grossman had particular instructions for Travers. Perhaps to increase her mystique, she was to leave the speaking onstage to Yarrow and Stookey (a request she agreed to, given her stage fright at the time). More oddly, according to a December 2020 episode of the podcast "500 Songs" by Andrew Hickey, Grossman also insisted that Travers stay inside, lest any tan that resulted spoiled her image.

Yarrow and Stookey composed only a handful of songs themselves (“Puff the Magic Dragon” and “I Dig Rock ‘n’ Roll Music”) and they exhibited serviceable rather than virtuoso guitar skills. But, after considerable refinement by arranger and producer Milt Okun, they learned how to blend their harmonies effortlessly with Travis.

Moreover, they proved excellent interpreters of works by others, as they exposed listeners not only to Dylan but also to the likes of Gordon Lightfoot (“Early Morning Rain”), Laura Nyro (“And When I Die”), Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs and John Denver (“Leaving on a Jet Plane”).

Commercial success and high cultural visibility followed. Twelve hit singles came in the nine years after their formation in 1961, and the three singers appeared at the 1963 March on Washington, at the White House for the celebration of John F. Kennedy's second year in office, and at Martin Luther King's 1965 march on Selma.

The group broke up in 1970, not because of the clashes over ego, money, and creative direction that bedevil so many other musical combos, but simply because Stookey feared a heavy touring schedule would jeopardize his family life.

Travers used the next several years away from her musical partners to good effect—writing poetry, hosting her own radio show (even landing the first interview that Dylan had given in over a decade), and, by necessity, taking greater command in her solo concerts than she had done with Yarrow and Stookey.

The three singers stayed on good terms after they ceased working together in 1970, so no tensions had to be eased over when they reunited eight years later for a no-nukes benefit concert.

An album, titled, appropriately enough, Reunion, followed, and though its pop arrangements reportedly disappointed Yarrow by departing from their more folk-oriented sound, it provided a pretext for touring and reconnecting with their audience.

When I saw them in an August 1978 concert at Central Park, they were received rapturously by fans.

Peter, Paul and Mary continued to perform together, albeit less frequently, until a few months before Travers' death. But they were aware that they were fighting rather than in sync with the national zeitgeist, as they contrasted the "Us Decade" of the 1960s with the "Me Decade" of the Jimmy Carter years.

Moreover, from the 1980s on, they were often condescendingly regarded as relics of a bygone era, even the model for "The Folksmen" for the film mockumentary "A Mighty Wind," according to this January 2015 blog post by Glen Herbert. 

All of this was beside the point, as far as their musical legacy was concerned. Was the trio's sometimes-derided earnestness really any worse than other musical artists' snarkiness? 

In any case, the group still enjoyed playing for appreciative audiences, and their harmonies remained largely undimmed by the inevitable aging process. Travers herself was now more ready to challenge convention, whether in public, on US policy towards Central America in the Reagan years, or even privately with Yarrow and Stookey. 

Even in these later years, she was influencing a later generation of folksingers, according to singer-songwriter Nerissa Nields in a blog post appropriately titled "Thank You, Mary" right after Travers' death:

"The Mary we all saw in the sixties was much more complicated and interesting than the blond, leggy, silent-except-when-belting-her heart-out Greenwich Village waif we mostly got to see.... By the time [sister] Katryna and I got to watch her perform in person in the mid-80s, she was silent no longer. Au contraire: she was full of opinions. She was also significantly overweight, a fact she joked about from the stage. She was breaking all the rules, tossing out all the adjectives assigned to her. And through that singular revolution, she liberated two future folk singers." 

Now in their eighties, Yarrow and Stookey continue to perform together, but I am sure they would acknowledge that something is inevitably missing without their longtime female partner. Those yearning for that missing element can find a Peter, Paul and Mary tribute band on YouTube. But nothing compares to the charismatic blonde with the ringing alto that touched the heart.

Quote of the Day (Folk Music’s Eric Andersen, on How Books Opened ‘Palatial-Sized Windows for Me’)

“I’m pretty much self-taught in the literary jewel-eye of interest department. My dad retired early and went back to college to study under Robert Creeley at the University of Buffalo. My small circle of musical high school friends and I created folk groups with guitars and banjos and harmonies. We also loved poetry. Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and the Beats including Ferlinghetti. I read a lot of Russian literature on my own. Kerouac’s On the Road was a big deal to any kid like me who harbored dreams of travel and adventure. Books gave you the sense there was a big world out there beyond your backyard waiting for you to visit and take part. Books opened giant palatial-sized windows for me. Where most of my high school friends enjoyed armchair lit. adventures, they would eventually finish their education, get jobs, make families, settle down in the straight, striving secure square life with dreams of serenity. I took every word of these books personally and acted on it. I got away. But alone, on the road would soon come the high lonely risk of getting drafted in a bogus war. Later would come Eliot, Kafka, Ibsen, Hamsun, Joyce and Burroughs. And I loved Whitman.”—Singer-songwriter Eric Andersen quoted in John Kruth, “Eric Andersen: Beat Sensibility in a Folksinger Crowd,” PleaseKillMe blog, Apr. 20, 2021

A documentary about Andersen, “The Songpoet,” will play on PBS’ “All Arts” station this week. I have not previously listened to his music, but based on the interview in the link above, maybe I should pay more attention. In any event, I will try to catch this show.

(The image accompanying this post, of Andersen on Apr. 20, 2006, came from Infodek at English Wikipedia.)

Song Lyric of the Day (Shawn Colvin, on Starting a New Chapter in Her Life)

“I brushed my hair, I held my breath

I went out to face the wilderness.”— Shawn Colvin and John Leventhal, "Summer Dress," performed by Colvin on her CD, These Four Walls (2006)

This post has been a bit late coming. But I didn’t want to let too much more time pass by without taking note of the very, very fine performance by Shawn Colvin and Lyle Lovett on Tuesday night in Englewood, NJ. (The concert at BergenPAC—a venue whose acoustics and audiences seem to be special favorites of musicians, judging from the repeat performers passing through—was made additionally memorable by meeting up with my longtime friends Brian, Martin and Cindy.)

The two longtime friends combined a form of mutual admiration society and comic duo, with the kind of unfeigned banter that morning show hosts might strive for but don’t always achieve. They spring primarily from two distinctive musical traditions—folk and country music—and achieved their greatest commercial success in larger combos.

But, on the acoustic guitar, each demonstrated what Lovett observed about his musical partner: that, even with a single instrument, they provide the solid foundation of a full band.

Both in their early sixties, Colvin and Lovett bring to their own exquisitely crafted songs skill, strength and depth undimmed by the years. (Colvin’s “Summer Dress”—written after breakups with her second husband and her record company—will be especially relevant for those going through midlife issues, as so many I know are doing so now.)

I recommend that any readers who have never seen these veteran singer-songwriters in concert, alone or together, try to do so now. You will leave the hall wanting to revisit the extensive, accomplished musical catalog of each.

Song Lyric of the Day (Joni Mitchell, on How ‘All That Lives Is Getting’ Out’)

“Now the warriors of winter

They gave a cold triumphant shout

And all that stays is dying

And all that lives is gettin' out.”— Joni Mitchell, “Urge For Going,” from her CD Hits (1996)

By rights, I should have written about Joni Mitchell two days ago, on her 70^th birthday. But the centennial of the birth of a towering writer of the 20^th century, Albert Camus, trumped it. Still, this milestone in the life of the singer-songwriter must not go unobserved.

More often than not, I think, the mind’s eye freezes the look of a celebrity at the zenith of fame, and so it is with Ms. Mitchell. She is indelibly associated with album covers (often painted by herself) that capture the long, thin face and long, straight blond hair that transfixed lovers almost as much as her strikingly poetic lyrics when she appeared, fresh off the Canadian prairie, at the forefront of the singer-songwriter movement of the late Sixties and early Seventies.

I had a tough time deciding on a lyric for this post that encapsulated Ms. Mitchell. There’s “A Case of You,” as complicated a love song as there is in its mixture of derision and poetic intoxication (her lover goes to her head like “holy wine”) and “Both Sides Now,” so extraordinarily wised-up for someone still only in her mid-20s about “life’s illusions.”

But “Urge for Going” seemed apt on several different levels. Although it only appeared on an album late in Mitchell’s career, it was one of the early lyrics covered by folk-music mentor Tom Rush; it represented her first commercial success (albeit in the version by country music artist George Hamilton IV); and has been covered on record by nearly 80 artists in all. It just missed making the cut for what Jack Hamilton, in an article for The Atlantic earlier this year, called “The Greatest Relationship Album Ever”: i.e., Blue.

A song that took its place on that seminal LP, “All I Want,” announces, "I am on a lonely road / and I am traveling." She repeats that last word four times—a simpler, yet more insistent, rephrasing of the theme of “Urge for Going,” and, really, the great majority of Ms. Mitchell’s work: the conflict between love and the need for creative freedom.

Rolling Stone once infuriated Mitchell by publishing a “tree” detailing her emotional entanglements, usually with other musicians (e.g., Leonard Cohen, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash). None of these lasted, nor did her two marriages. “Urge for Going” likens the fading of passion to the changing of the seasons, in phrases startling not only for their powerful compression of ideas but also because of their likening to the worst impulses in human beings, the kind that take inevitable tolls on relationships: “warriors of winter,” “gobbled summer down,” “traitor cold,” “bully winds.”

Only one Mitchell CD has been released in the last decade: Shine (2007). Except for a birthday tribute earlier this year, her public appearances have been rare, largely because she has been fighting health problems (notably, Morgellons Syndrome, a parasitic infestation whose diagnosis has been controversial in some medical quarters).

One wonders how much she would have recorded even had disease not plagued her. Her contempt for the music industry has only deepened with the years, and, long having felt that she was “a painter derailed by circumstance" (her art, heavily influenced by Impressionism, ran counter to the trend toward abstraction in the early Sixties), she has taken up the brush with greater concentration now she has achieved her long-sought independence.

(The photo of Ms. Mitchell accompanying this post came from an Asylum Records ad from 1974.)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Meet the Parents,’ on ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’)

Greg Focker (played by Ben Stiller): [in the car listening to "Puff the Magic Dragon"] “Who would've thought it wasn't really about a dragon, huh?”

Jack Byrnes (played by Robert DeNiro): “What do you mean?”

Greg: “You know, the whole drug thing?”

Jack: “No, I don't know. Why don't you tell me?”

Greg: “Some people think that to 'puff the magic dragon’ means to- They're really, uh - to smoke - to smoke - a marijuana cigarette.”

Jack: “Puff's just the name of the boy's magical dragon.”

Greg: “Right.”

Jack: “Are you a pothead, Focker?”

Greg: “No! No. What? No, no, no, no, Jack. No, I'm - I'm not - I - I pass on grass all the time. I mean, not all the time.”

Jack: “Yes or no, Greg?”

Greg: “No. Yes. No.”—Meet the Parents (2000), story by Greg Glienna and Mary Ruth Clark, screenplay by Jim Herzfeld and John Hamburg, directed by Jay Roach

Oh, my….Ol’ CIA hand Jack thought he’d heard everything, till his daughter’s fiancé Greg innocently blurted out the not-so-innocent interpretation of “Puff the Magic Dragon.” If you were in Jack's shoes, wouldn't you want to hook him up to the wires in these photos, just to clear up that little problem with the truth that Greg's just displayed?

The only problem was, the Peter, Paul and Mary hit—which reached its top position (#2) on the Billboard charts in the U.S. on this date 50 years ago—really was about childhood innocence lost, as claimed by trio member Peter Yarrow, who composed the music to a set of lyrics left on his typewriter by Cornell classmate Leonard Lipton in 1959.

Not that it’s completely impossible to understand how the drug interpretation of the song ( popularized in a 1964 Newsweek article) came about. Consider the Beatles, for instance.

John Lennon, known to have sampled more than a few mild-altering substances in his time, always adamantly denied that “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” was about LSD, and I tend to believe him, since he didn’t give a damn whom he ticked off. On the other hand, Paul McCartney ‘fessed up that “Got to Get You Into My Life” was about the need to incorporate drugs more into his daily routine. In its way, the latter song, with its ebullient vibe, was far more insidious than his bandmate’s controversial tune—and certainly more than Yarrow’s.

Well, without those creative (mis)readings of some of the seminal pop tunes of our time, we would never have had the exchange between Greg and Jack--which alone, as far as I'm concerned, made Meet the Parents worth the price of admission all by itself.

This Day in Pop Music History (1st Dylan Album: ‘Hammond’s Folly‘)

March 19, 1962—The first album by a folk singer-songwriter from Minnesota, released on this date, gave virtually no inkling that he would become part of the bedrock of his label, let alone part of the great legacy of the talent scout who signed him. Not only did Bob Dylan compose only two of the 13 tracks on his self-titled LP, but the record’s abysmal sales—less than 5,000 copies in its first year—seemed to justify the naysayers who questioned what John Hammond heard in the nasal voice of the scrawny 20-year-old in his office.

A half-century later, with Dylan having helped recoup the original investment of Columbia Records many times over, it’s easy to see why Hammond—who had discovered such jazz greats as Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Lionel Hampton, among many others—wanted to sign Dylan. “You’re a talented young man,” Dylan remembered Hammond’s conversation 40 years afterward. “If you can focus and control that talent, you’ll be fine.”

Already, Dylan was showing the same insouciant disregard for convention that would lead him to cross genres repeatedly over the next couple of decades. (After signing the contract Hammond gave him, he obeyed his new mentor’s request that he visit a studio publicist, then fed the flack a lot of biographical hooey: “I hated these kind of questions,” Dylan wrote in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume I. “Felt I could ignore them.”) But even he sensed the immensity of what Hammond had done for him:

“Columbia was one of the first and foremost labels in the country and for me to even get my foot in the door was serious. For starters, folk music was considered junky, second rate and only released on small labels. Big-time record companies were strictly for the elite, for music that was sanitized and pasteurized. Someone like myself would never be allowed in except under extraordinary circumstances. But John was an extraordinary man. He didn’t make schoolboy records or record schoolboy artists. He had vision and foresight, had seen and heard me, felt my thoughts and had faith in the things to come.”

Hammond would need that faith, and then some. When other Columbia execs heard the album—recorded by Hammond himself for only $400—they put up such a stink that they ended up delaying its release till four months after it was originally taped. Hammond hadn’t been able to hold onto Joan Baez, they sneered, and now he had signed this? No obvious singles sprang out at David Kapralik, Hammond’s boss.

Eventually, Hammond appealed to CBS president Goddard Lieberson to get the album released. Lieberson agreed, but his support didn’t make much of a difference in the album’s sales, anyway: With just about no advertising or promotion, the LP was virtually dead on arrival.

Several years later, Dylan would sing that “Tomorrow is a Long Time,” but it came to him rather swiftly later that year. Within a month after the release of Dylan’s album, another folksinger, Gil Turner, would perform a new song by his friend at Gerde’s Folk City, and that summer Dylan would record it himself for his next LP. A year later, Peter, Paul and Mary’s cover version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” made him, whether he liked it or not, the voice of the younger generation. Except for a couple of years in the Seventies, he has remained at Columbia Records ever since.

As for Hammond, having survived tough in-fighting at the label, he went on to sign other non-jazz musicians who would only further burnish his reputation as an uncanny judge of talent, including Stevie Ray Vaughn, Aretha Franklin and a twentysomething singer-songwriter from New Jersey that many hailed as the “New Dylan,” Bruce Springsteen. A year before his death in 1987, Hammond was inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Fame of Fame for his contributions to the industry.