Songs of Noel

In the 1960s, Peter, Paul and Mary altered the musical landscape of this country forever.
South Blue Hill’s Noel Paul Stookey is the “Paul” of that gutsy, enduring folk trio that made music into a language of change.

In 1962, the group’s first album, simply titled Peter, Paul and Mary, soared to the top of the charts. A year later, PP&M galvanized a quarter million people at the March on Washington—when Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech—singing about “the hammer of justice,” “the bell of freedom,” “the song about love between my brothers and sisters, all over this land.” Their recorded sound—put on the far right, left, and middle of the speakers rather than as one combined vocal track in the center—brought an honest, aching quality to their music that resonated with the generation’s youth, who wanted to end segregation, get out of Vietnam, and sometimes simply “frolic in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.”

Peter, Paul and Mary disbanded in 1970—the same year music lost the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel. Stookey had experienced a spiritual conversion in 1968, and being on the road, playing 200 concerts a year, with a wife and family, no longer made sense to him. The other members of the trio couldn’t envision themselves as just a recording group, so they disbanded. But in 1978, the trio reunited for a benefit concert and decided to stay together on a smaller, more manageable scale. Thirty years later, the group continues writing, exploring, recording, touring—maybe 40 concerts a year—while they each foster individual careers.

Stookey’s solo path has focused on using music to speak of and to the soul, and to effect positive change. Following its release in 1971, Stookey turned over the royalties from his classic “Wedding Song” to the Public Domain Foundation; in the years since, this one song has earned nearly $2 million for charity. Although he’s released over a dozen albums, in addition to the 25 PP&M recordings, 2007 marked his first new solo studio album in 20 years, Facets. Stookey is currently working on his fourth album for the children’s label Hugworks, which produces music designed to nurture kids at risk. A producer as well as a singer-songwriter, his Neworld Multimedia produces the works of over 30 musicians from all over the country.

You played in a band in high school and self-produced a couple of records. So when you went to New York in 1959, you went for music?
No, no, I went to meet girls and have an apartment. I was 20 years old. New York was Oz.

So how did the music develop?
I used to go to the Village to play chess with a coworker [Stookey had a regular job at a photographic chemical company] and one night the place had removed our table and installed a stage. Everybody was an artist then. I became the MC, a bit of a stand-up comic. I had a ball. I began to absorb the beginnings of folk ethic. And I met Mary and Peter.

Is it possible in this day and age for a folk entity to hit the top of the charts the way Peter, Paul and Mary did?
Yes, but not in the same way. We broke the mold in the ’60s and permeated to all the musical styles, so now you can be doing hip-hop and be doing folk; you can be punk and be doing folk. So, what I’m saying is that folk music is alive, and songs of conscience and concern are alive, but they’re all over the map and show up in different ways, like maybe Sting singing about South Africa.

How is the vocabulary or subject matter of songs you write now different from songs back then?
I can’t answer that directly except to say that songwriting is evolutionary, that one song becomes the building block of the next song, both in terms of musical knowledge and in terms of insight into the philosophy and psychology of people, the life you lead, even the head of the listener.

From 1962 to 1969, those were some pretty heady years. Top of the charts, bestsellers, adoring crowds. Then you left the group. What happened?
I was disillusioned with myself as a person. There were these two people on stage during those Peter, Paul and Mary years—there was this person that I really thought I was, who was perfectly willing to live in the style of . . . but there was this other person who I wanted to know. I knew if I was going to have any value to myself and to the world around me, I was going to have to get to know who that was. I needed to be honest with myself, I needed to know me, and that was a spiritual experience. From that passion, that inner directive, you can then substantially contribute to the world because you’re contributing your “self.” Until 1968, I didn’t have a self, which is good if you want to be a comedian. Once a comedian learns to be true to [himself], [he] starts to be less “funny” and more profound.

Did moving to the Blue Hill area in 1973 influence your writing?
It influenced the music immensely. Here, I could see the structure of belief and songs in the simplest way. One can be quite spare in the country on a lot of levels. I think popular music is a metaphor. We attempt in four minutes to create an alternate reality that expresses several aspects of life. The country served as a great filter. But the major contribution was the spiritual conversion and recognizing that I was loved.

When you’re composing a song, how do you know that the lyrics are right?
You remember the first time you heard Dylan and he sang yet another verse that said essentially the same thing, using different lyrics? You keep circling the point until you’re sure you’ve made it. And you just get lucky sometimes.

You wrote “My Father’s House” in the car driving to pick up your daughter. Is that how you normally write songs?
That was not a normal pattern, but I’d be hard-pressed to give you a normal pattern. I’m a cathartic writer. I’m not a disciplined writer. I write pretty much in response to that which I think is not being said. It doesn’t have to be heavy. “Virtual Party,” for instance, is not heavy. It’s a commentary on the relationship between intimacy and technology that I felt needed to be vented.

In the last few years, how has life changed?
Lately we’ve been led in new directions. Betty [his wife of 44 years] is an ordained minister . . . and we’re working together more and more. We just returned from a small Quaker school in North Carolina, and we’re about to head to Key West for a similar presentation. People are groping toward a common language in terms of feeling good about their own faith journey and feeling good about somebody else’s faith journey. I do the music and Betty does readings from Native Americans to Gandhi to Muslims, and somewhere in all of that the evidence of something spiritually connected happens.

Why is it that music has more power as an agent of change than some other art forms?
It’s less subtle. Its attack on the emotions is immediate. And every time you come on a refrain—“the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind”—I mean, it just redoubles.

What are the compelling challenges of our times?
Restraint. Patience. Humility. Those are such needy components for this laboring world and they’re hard to come by.

Even individually.
I was actually talking personally. On Facets, there’s a song called “Revolution.” My favorite part is the second bridge: “We’re a raggle taggle army, got no uniform or guns, but we’ve been called by coincidence, so maybe we’re the ones.” I love that image. For a perfect world, we don’t all have to be the same. Love, God, enlists us individually, not by merit but by grace, in this incredibly complex dance where everybody is everybody’s partner.