Download Peter Yarrow's favorite folk songs from his latest Peter Yarrow Songbook collection Favorite Folk Songs, scheduled to be available November 4, 2008, from Sterling Publishing.

Discoveries of the Heart and Mind
By Peter Yarrow

When I was about seven years old, my mother took me to see Isaac Stern. I simply fell in love with the sound of Isaac Stern playing the violin, and I was moved to the depths of my soul by the intensity of the emotion he generated. I wanted to be able to express my emotions, too.

Learning Violin

I begged my mother to let me take violin lessons. When we moved to Chautauqua in Upper New York State—a center of progressive thought and classical music—I took violin lessons from Hortense Mischakoff, the wife of Mischa Mischakoff, concertmaster of the Chautauqua and New
York Philharmonic Orchestras.

As I learned the violin, I began to acquire an image of myself, and this image became a major tool for my development. It also became central to my becoming a teacher, of sorts, in my children’s classes. I started to visit each of them once a week in their preschool years and continued until sixth grade. I must say those weekly sessions were some of the happiest moments of my life.

High School Years

The transition from my love of violin to my passion for folk music and playing the guitar began at the High School of Music and Art (M&A) in New York City, where a wondrous world of high hopes, continued stimulation—emotional, social, academic, and creative—and an amazing spirit of delight and friendliness prevailed. The atmosphere of “do it for the doing” bonded students together with a sense of emotional empathy, hopeful idealism, joy, and a sense of community that was neither boastful nor mean spirited, neither exclusive nor disrespectful. The atmosphere at M&A helped us write our story, understand and value our path, know what we stood for, become comfortable with ourselves, accept others who might otherwise seem frightening or uncomfortable, and find the best in ourselves to give to others and to society. Ideas that inspired me to create the Operation Respect program.

I discovered folk music at M&A. When I was singing with others, something within me that hurt bitterly no longer hurt. Something within me that longed for a place to call home found contentment. And something within me that had always felt brutalized by the selfishness, superficiality, and gratuitous mean-spiritedness that I saw was liberated. Singing folk music was, for me, “Freedom Land.”

Was I a leader of songs in M&A? Not particularly. Did I look up to others who were quintessential fold artists and singers? Of course! I sang with Eric Weisberg (a superb instrumentalist who created and played “Dueling Banjos”) and Happy Traum (who along with his brother Artie went on to teach guitar and other folk instruments to thousands of people).

Group singing at M&A usually took place after school, outside the building, or during parties, where a string quartet convened in one room and the merits of socialism were debated in another. Of course, young love and first courtship—such as it was in those times—weaved its way through it all. We thought, we hoped, we felt close, we danced, we laughed, we made up verses, and perhaps most important, we simply felt accepted and really good about ourselves.

Is it any wonder that when I got the chance to finally bring my music experiences to others, I chose not the experience of performing with my gifted and beloved friends Mary Travers and Noel Paul Stookey, but the experience of that heavenly time in M&A. I simply loved being with my own daughter and son, along with their respective classmates, and bringing that early experience of M&A to their classrooms. In addition, although the years with Noel Paul and Mary informed and honed my skills, when I was in the classroom, it was more my mother’s sensibilities that gave me the history and approach that made this experience so special.

When I visited my children’s classes, it was my time to inspire, engage, and empower students. I watched in them a transformation that I had experienced in my childhood, translating my history into one that could reach those open, eager, and malleable young spirits.

 The March on Washington, Dr. King, and “Stewball”

I’ve always loved the song “Stewball.” I recorded it with Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers on our third album released in 1963, the year of the March on Washington where Peter, Paul & Mary sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” before a quarter-million people—the most moving and transforma- tional experience of our performing lives. There Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his unforgettable “I Have A Dream” speech. That experience changed me and, I believe, most everyone who was there that day.

August 28, 1963, was, for so many of us, a turning point. For us, we truly began to believe that a group of people— ordinary people empowered solely by their convictions, their mutual hope and vision, and their fierce determination to not ever waver until that vision is fulfilled—might carry that dream, grow in strength, and finally reach the hearts of America and then the nexus of power in America, and change our country for the better. Amazing, but for some reason, that dream became a reality that day for those who marched together, sang together, and felt the power of the words of Dr. King.

I maintain that it was partly the music that allowed people to achieve that moment and it was partly the feeling among the crowd. That feeling sprang from their heady inspiration, from their tears of sorrow turned to hope and joy, from the weight of history’s oppression of people of color in our country. A country where there was yet to be a day when any one of us could say the words from our Pledge of Allegiance “with liberty and justice for all” and not feel that we were being hypocritical and would be so until that lie was faced squarely. And somehow, our country changed its ways.

Now, with this day in 1963, we could truly reach for a portion of the dream and work for it. Some paid a heavy price for our commitment, like Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, the famous trio of college students who traveled to Mississippi to register voters and gave their lives for it. The dream had a long way to go to be realized, even in part, but from that day on, we held on to that dream, as we still do today.

Stewball’s Role

When I sang “Stewball” (see lyrics) to my students, without letting them know how much the song meant to me, I allowed myself to feel the longing for freedom that is expressed in the song and was so powerfully experienced in 1963 at that march. I sang of my own longing for a better society, an end to useless and ignorant hatred and prejudice, a longing for the Stewballs of the world to triumph and, against all odds, win that race.

Brother Martin was a Stewball to me. So was my beloved friend, idol, and mentor, Congressman
and activist, Allard Lowenstein. So was Eugene McCarthy, who opened the first possibility that the spirit of the music I had been singing might actually be embraced by a president of the United States.

My mind, my heart, my tears, my hopes were all embedded in “Stewball” when I sang it in the classroom that week, and when the children sang it with me, somehow I knew beyond a doubt that they understood, in their own innocent ways, what I was experiencing as I sang the song. During the song, one of the children in the class began to cry. I could sense that she was astonished by the way her heart opened up to the spirit of the song. I believe she hovered between an intense feeling of identification with either Stewball or the person who failed to bet on Stewball and, therefore, was not free. (As the singer says, “If I’d bet on old Stewball, I’d be a free man today.”)

Operation Respect and Education

I have seen this kind of response hundreds of times since then in the presentations I have made to educational groups for Operation Respect, a school-based educational nonprofit I founded in 1999 to create climates of learning conducive to—and fulfilling the needs that nurture—the academic, social, and emotional growth of all students. When I sing “Don’t Laugh At Me,”* the heart-opening anthem of Operation Respect, the response I saw when I sang “Stewball” years before emerges from teachers, administrators, and students alike.

In educating our children, I believe we need to open our hearts to one another. Music, and especially singing together, is a very special way to do that. We need to know that we are not alone when we experience our emotions, our fears, our hopes, and our joy. We need to get beyond ourselves and find great comfort in discovering that we need only be connected and human to reap the true fruits of life. We need to be allowed to evolve in such a way that we are wholly interconnected but still independent spirits. Music and the arts can frame and guide the many discoveries of the heart and mind that we make in that lifelong journey.

That is the gift of folk music with its long tradition, its humbling honesty, its startling authenticity, as I experienced it in class that day singing “Stewball.” We all can be released and become less afraid of the unknowable, more open to one another, less at the mercy of those who might insist on telling us what we are, who we are, and what we need to think or believe.

Singing together is powerful stuff. I know for sure that I continue to be replenished each and every time I sing. I hope that you, your students, and all the children entrusted to your and our care become as fortunate as I have been. I so hope that you will be able find this kind of replenishment by listening to and directly living the arts as I have through folk music. When sung, the songs themselves become our teaching assistants; or more properly stated, we become their assistants when we share the wisdom of the songs and their traditions with others, particularly, of course, with children.

Good luck and good singing.

Peter Yarrow

* “Don’t Laugh at Me” was written by Steve Seskin and Allen Shamblin