My high school days ran from 1959 to 1963. It was a time of transition, not just for me, but for the whole country. The Vietnam era was just beginning, and none of us could forget hiding under our desks in grammar school in those "atom bomb" drills.
Thanks to Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger, we started to hear the folk music of America's past. From the blues to the hill country music, and from old labor protest songs to the laments of migrant workers in the South, we began to become aware that our America wasn't just the calm, friendly place we thought it was. All of this hit me like a ton of bricks in about 1960. What an awakening. I listened to Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and other pioneers in the resurrection of another kind of music of America, far from the Rock and Roll so popular with other kids my age.
Three friends and I shared this fascination. We dug up some guitars, an autoharp, and an antique 5-string banjo and started learning how to play them. We were all band geeks, so we knew something about music, and taught ourselves the rudiments of these strange stringed instruments. We learned the few chords necessary to handle most folk music, and I learned basic clawhammer techniques on the banjo from an old timer in a music store.
We got a copy of one of Alan Lomax's collections of American Folk music, and started learning songs that appealed to us. Pretty soon, we were performing at school events and in the local churches, Rotary Clubs, and other friendly venues. We never went any farther than that, but we learned the music and helped spread it at a local level over the next couple of years.
At the same time, others were doing the same thing, but on a larger scale. Bob Dylan was spinning off the old Woody Guthrie stuff, and Joan Baez was singing the old songs, and some new ones. Groups like The Brothers Four, The Lettermen, The Limelighters, and Peter, Paul and Mary were bringing this newly-rediscovered music into the popular music scene. Others, like Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, were reviving bluegrass music. It was a music revolution for some of us in those days of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and a quartet of long-haired boys from England. It was an alternative at a time when we needed one.
That alternative included songs of protest against war, poverty, and other evils of modern civilization. Every group included some of these protest songs in their repertory, and new ones were written in the same style. Everyone influenced one another, and paid homage to some of the folks from the previous generation who had dedicated their lives to collecting this dying brand of music so it could be passed along.
For many of us who were growing up in the period, that music was the beginning of a new way of looking at the world. Inspired by the music and the lyrics that made it up, we began to question the status quo. We moved from being complacent kids to seekers of something else. Some of us joined the protesters in Selma. Others founded and populated the anti-war movement brought on by our ill-fated excursion into Vietnam. Some became hippies. Some of us just became staunch liberals and progressives.
Mary Travers, the female vocalist from Peter, Paul, and Mary, was one small element of that process. Mentored by Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax, she was a part of the inspiration that led so many of us in the early 60s to learn, grow, and go on to change the face of America. Now that inspired and inspiring generation is beginning to leave us. It reminds us just how much change we've seen and been part of. We'll miss you, Mary!
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That is Really Sad
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Ahh...we were all young and attractive back then.
