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Rating: During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, with the Emancipation Proclamation, declared all the slaves of the Confederate States free. It was August 28, 1863.
Exactly 100 years later, on August 28, 1963, in Washington, there was the Great March for Jobs and Freedom, in support of the civil and economic rights of African Americans. Here, Reverend Martin Luther King delivered his famous speech, “I Have a Dream”, in front of 250,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial. A speech, in its most beautiful improvised part, was consigned to the collective memory as the most radical symbol of every fight against racism and segregation.
The march featured performances by Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, Odetta (with a great repertoire of Blues songs), Marian Anderson (a stunning contralto who spanned from Lieder to Spirituals, from Opera to American tradition), the Folk queen Joan Baez, and the young and brilliant minstrel Bob Dylan. There was also, curiously enough, the most popular Folk trio of the time, the one that made “Blowin’ in the Wind” famous, which is Peter, Paul & Mary.
Listening to them today, the vocal harmonies of this trio are almost amusing. Without almost. They seem funny. But this is not the case. These songs had a social function. Small, timid guitar strums, sparse accompaniment chords, devoid of speed and weight. A gentle, polite, bare, soft style, not to say “soft”. A disarming fragility. The essentiality coupled with perfect intonation.
In the early '60s, in the USA, they were quite esteemed, if not considered the number one. They had the not ephemeral merit of having attracted the attention of the bourgeoisie to social themes that would later be dear to the hippies, widening the political consciousness of a generation otherwise devoid and preparing the ground for the “Hard Rain” of Robert Zimmerman.
Mary Travers (Louisville, 1936), Paul Stookey (Baltimore, 1937) and Peter Yarrow (New York, 1938) met in Greenwich Village in 1960. Noticed at the Bitter End by Albert Grossman, who would later produce Dylan and Joplin, they were signed to Warner Bros. and immediately launched into success with the beautiful “If I Had a Hammer”. The text by Pete Seeger was sweetened, trivialized, and rendered frivolous in Italy, pleasantly interpreted by Rita Pavone. The correct translation could be as follows:
If I had a hammer
I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening
All over this land
I'd hammer out danger
I'd hammer out a warning
I'd hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land
If I had a bell
I'd ring it in the morning
I'd ring it in the evening
All over this land
I'd ring out danger
I'd ring out a warning
I'd ring out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land
If I had a song
I'd sing it in the morning
I'd sing it in the evening
All over this land
I'd sing out danger
I'd sing out a warning
I'd sing out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land
Well I've got a hammer,
And I've got a bell,
And I've got a song to sing
All over this land
It's the hammer of Justice
It's the bell of Freedom
It's the song about Love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land
Justice, what an outdated theme! And how much wonderful and direct naivety. On the emotional level, where the piece operates, justice is the meeting of anger with joy.
“Blowin’ in the Wind” had christened the semi-unknown Dylan, making the piece a widespread phenomenon on the national radio. A cute dive, later, into the world of childhood singing raised with “Puff (The Magic Dragon)”, 1963, which for some lends itself even to a pre-psychedelic reading (anticipating the Great Society and Jefferson Airplane from Alice's White Rabbit).
Destiny naturally wanted the trio to disappear like the walls of Jericho under the push of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. They would try to survive with children's songs, dubbing themselves Peter, Paul & Mommy. The last spurt, in 1970, is with “Leaving On a Jet Plane” by John Denver, while their Folk became increasingly close to Pop and Easy Listening. Inevitably, they dissolved to reappear only sporadically. Yarrow was even convicted for several months of incarceration for sexual misconduct.
Instantly ignored by the star-spangled youth and the world, they will not be remembered (read “no one will give a damn about them anymore”) even by the Folk Revival, which still owes them.
“Ten Years Together: The Best of Peter, Paul & Mary” is a decent collection from far back in 1970, of noble and quiet simplicity, certainly surpassed for completeness by ”The Very Best of” by Rhino (2005), but present in the Debaser database, which otherwise does not lend reviews or listens. The collection captures them in those first ten important years, or at least not negligible ones, and boasts on the cover a beautiful illustration by Milton Glaser, clear and poetic. Indeed, there is “500 Miles”, a track emblematic of their existential attention.
“500 Miles” is a delicate, titillating song, that makes me feel cradled like very few others. It wraps you in a sort of amniotic fluid, with a measured and vibrant melody. And with Mary's full singing.
If you miss the train I'm on,
you will know that I am gone
You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles,
a hundred miles, a hundred miles,
a hundred miles, a hundred miles,
You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles.
Lord I'm one, Lord I'm two,
Lord I'm three, Lord I'm four,
Lord I'm five hundred miles from my home.
five hundred miles, five hundred miles,
five hundred miles, five hundred miles
Lord I 'm five hundred miles from my home.
Not a shirt on my back,
not a penny to my name
Lord, I can't go a-home this a-way
This a-way, this a-way,
this a-way, this a-way,
Lord I can't go a-home this a-way.
If you miss the train I'm on
you will know that I am gone
You can hear the whistle blow
a hundred miles.
This song is a wound received in the depths of the heart, perhaps from the tip of an immaterial desire. Mary pierces you and says, with trembling beauty, that whatever you miss, whatever you are willing to call home, distances do not crush you and hope does not die. Then these distances must be understood, must be traveled in both directions. Because they separate us from ourselves. And from others.
There are only thirteen songs in total, including “Don’t Think Twice, It’s all Right”, “Stewball”, “I Dig Rock and Roll Music”.
Mary, meanwhile, left us on September 16, 2009, after a long battle with leukemia.
“But when we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we speed up that day when all of God's children, black and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants, will be able to join hands and sing the words of the old spiritual: “Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last”.
[Martin Luther King – Washington, August 28, 1963 ]
Whether one likes it or not, the exodus is the fundamental journey of every existence.
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