Warner Bros. 1449
Producer: Albert Grossman
Track listing: Early in the Morning / 500 Miles / Sorrow / This Train / Bamboo / It’s Raining / If I Had My Way / Cruel War / Lemon Tree / If I Had a Hammer / Autumn to May / Where Have All the Flowers Gone
October 20, 1962
7 weeks: 6 weeks mono, 1 week combined chart
As early as 1958, the Kingston Trio had proven that folk music could be a chart force. Yet the self-titled debut by the Greenwich Village, New York-based trio of Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey, and Mary Travers offered something substantially different than the Kingstons. “Our voices were not all in the center,” says Peter Yarrow. “Stereo meant Paul was full left, I was full right, and Mary was in the center. And the guitars were separated. It gave people an absolute intimate sense of what we were doing. It wasn’t a sound. It was three distinct human beings that were acoustically completely accessible. It allowed us to be individuals, rather than the Kingston Trio.”
Peter, Paul and Mary joined forces in 1961, at the suggestions of manager/producer Albert Grossman. Yarrow was a solo folk artist who appeared on the CBS-TV special “Folk Sound U.S.A.,” Stookey had been in a rock ‘n’ roll band in high school and performed stand-up comedy in Greenwich Village, while Travers had performed in school choruses and in The Next President, an unsuccessful 1957 Broadway musical with Mort Sahl.
Under Grossman’s guidance, the trio worked with arranger Milt Okun to craft its sound and cut some demo tapes, but initially the group generated little interest. “We went to Columbia, and they said, ‘The group can sing very well, but the material is all wrong.’ It was virtually the repertoire of the first album that we had sang on a demo, but they didn’t get it. They didn’t understand the appeal. They didn’t understand the idiom. They didn’t understand the part that folk music was inevitably and shortly to play in the American political, musical, and cultural landscape,” says Yarrow.
Eventually, as Billboard reported in its February 3, 1962 issue, the trio found a home at Warner Bros. Their debut album, Peter, Paul and Mary, was recorded at Music Makers studio in New York. It took approximately a month for the group to complete the 12 tracks. “People were kind of amazed how much time we took in the studio,” Yarrow recalls. “Back then, a month was considered a long time.”
The trio opted for a mix of originals, such as “Early in the Morning,” and folk staples, like Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.”
“If we loved a song, we did it. It didn’t make a difference if we had written it or not,” says Yarrow. “It was just about singing something that moved you. It had nothing to do with trying to anticipate the public’s taste, or trying to satisfy a publishing company, or a record company, it was a piece of art, the people’s art.”
“Lemon Tree,” the first single released from Peter, Paul and Mary, stalled at number 35 in June. “If I Had a Hammer,” however, was more successful, eventually reaching number 10. As “The Hammer Song” climbed the Hot 100, Peter, Paul and Mary nailed down the top of the 150 Best Selling Monaural LP’s chart, temporarily knocking off West Side Story. It marked the first music album on Warner Bros. to go to Number One. However, the album wasn’t truly recognized for its stereo sound until just over a year later, on October 26, 1963, when it returned to Number One on the Top LP’s chart, which no longer separated the stereo and monaural versions of albums.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of October 20, 1962
1. Peter, Paul and Mary, Peter, Paul and Mary
2. West Side Story, Soundtrack
3. Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music, Ray Charles
4. The Music Man, Soundtrack
5. Ramblin’ Rose, Nat King Cole