"I've Still Got a Song to Sing"... all over this land: Peter Yarrow LIVE!

Along with “Puff,” Yarrow is also well-known for writing other timeless folk standards including “Light One Candle,” The Great Mandala,” “Weave Me the Sunshine,” and many others — songs which, for some, have become so throughly ingrained in their consciousness that they sometimes seem they weren’t actually ever “written” at all.

Folk songs like these — and others written by Yarrow’s compatriots: Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Noel Paul Stookey, and so many more — can have lyrics that can be stirring or uplifting or inspiring, or can teach a lesson.

Likewise, they can ask a question or they can have a message.

Along with Stookey, Yarrow’s longtime musical partner, Mary Travers, once stated, “Asking questions — being able to ask questions; demanding answers — that is the essence of democracy.”

To Travers, American folk music equaled American democracy. And, to this end, Peter Paul and Mary’s 60s-era folk music was the soundtrack to an era:

The March on Washington

The American Civil Rights movement

The Women’s movement

The plight of migrant farmers

More recently, however, American folk music has occupied Wall Street, been featured to highlight nuclear risks, and used to bring about awareness of climate change.

Thus, folk music can still have just as powerful an effect as it did in the 60s… when people raise their voices together in song. As Yarrow contends, with folk music, “we can take that sense of togetherness and turn it into ‘something else’.”

Ever the folk troubadour, during his Grunin Center appearance, Yarrow weaved stories about his days with Stookey and Travers as he performed such PP&M classics as John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” “The Wedding Song (There Is Love),” written by Stookey as a gift for Yarrow’s first marriage, and, in tribute to the great Pete Seeger, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

Whenever Yarrow wanted “to bring Mary into the song,” he invited the audience to sing or hum her part as he expertly added intimate harmonies above or below it.

During the performance, Yarrow also made it a point to tell the audience about an endeavor close to his heart — a project called Operation Respect, an anti-bullying program he’s helped to put together which is currently being used in over 22,000 schools worldwide. Available free to educators at operationrespect.org, this program encourages all children to become peace-builders through music, notably through its signature song, “Don’t Laugh At Me.”

Whether captivating the audience with his masterful story-telling skills, singing a solo verse to a classic folk song, teaching the crowd a new lyric, or expertly dividing the crowd into sections and directing them to sing at the proper times while strumming along, Peter Yarrow reached this audience deeply and profoundly.

That said, at times, he was also charming and funny, singing about the woes of aging with his hilarious “Colonoscopy Song” or transforming himself into a young boy as he grinned and sang about baseball in his colleague, Noel Paul Stookey’s, heartwarming classic, “Right Field.”

For the evening’s grand finale, Yarrow invited the Michigan folk duo, Mustard’s Retreat, to join him on the Grunin stage. Proclaiming “I’ve still got a song to sing!” the audience knew they were there to witness something special as this legendary American folk musician performed the Peter Paul and Mary classics, “If I Had a Hammer,” “Blowing in the Wind,” and “This Land is Your Land.”