Noel Paul Stookey was still a long way from Maine when he and his Peter, Paul and Mary bandmates heard one of their songs, “Lemon Tree,” on the radio for the first time.
It was 1962, and the trio were riding across San Francisco Bay, heading to their first on-air appearance with the DJ who helped the track take off. They asked the record company representative driving the car to pull over so they could listen.
“Peter, Mary and I have no ‘cool’ at all” upon hearing it, Stookey recalls at the outset of a chapter of his biography-in-progress. “…We sit mesmerized by the sound of our own voices and guitars coming over the speakers until the song is done.”
Pulling back onto the highway, the Warner Brothers rep told them to get used to it.
Stookey, a longtime resident of Blue Hill, has spent most of the past decade looking back at moments like this while working on a book about his life with co-writer Jeanne Torrence Finley.
The book has a working title of “There is Love,” which is a reference to the subtitle of “The Wedding Song,” a tune Stookey said was given to him by God ahead of his bandmate’s wedding. The author said the writing process has brought surprises to both of them as it has developed over the course of the past 9 years.
Through the project, Stookey has taken a dive beyond the political messages of Peter, Paul and Mary into the spiritual experiences that have formed his life and drew his family to Maine. The two writers also see the project as a way to share their progressive Christian views and understandings of current events through metaphor, an approach they see as more accessible and broadly effective than traditional religious writing.
“The trio does have, and did have, its political opportunities,” Stookey told the Bangor Daily News. “Maybe this is an opportunity to tell the tale of a young kid who goes through some changes, has an immensely successful career because the times called for it, and now is confessing the core of his ongoing enthusiasm for performing being something more deep, or more spiritual, than a political call.”
Stookey, 87, rose to fame in the early 1960s alongside Mary Travers and Peter Yarrow. The trio was brought together in New York City’s Greenwich Village, where they were involved in the Civil Rights movement, resistance to the Vietnam War and other social justice causes through their careers.
They disbanded in 1970, pursued solo projects and reunited in 1978, continuing to perform together for decades. Travers died in 2009 after treatment for leukemia, followed by Yarrow in January this year.
When the band was still together in its first iteration, Stookey experienced a spiritual revelation that refocused him on his home life, brought him to a serious Christian faith and eventually led the family to Maine.
“Fame is a very invigorating and intoxicating presence, and it caused me to wobble in terms of direction,” Stookey said. “Everything became in terms of myself, to the exclusion of spending time with family and a certain dedication of heart.”
He told the Bangor Daily News in 1975 that, when the touring that kept him away from his young family became too much, he shaved off his beard one night and told his daughter he wouldn’t be going on the road anymore.
Soon after, Stookey, his wife, Betty, and their three young girls moved to South Blue Hill. The family started an RV tour of Maine’s coast in Camden, where folk singer Gordon Bok warned them coastal land was already inaccessible. Instead, they drove to Eastport and back, exploring peninsulas along the way, and knew when driving into Blue Hill that they had found their home.
More than 50 years later, the couple are still there and active in local benefits, concerts and classes. Local community station WERU formed in their old henhouse decades ago, as did an animation studio.
Another one of their projects, multifaith reading and music program One Light Many Candles, led Finley, Stookey’s co-author, to rediscover Stookey’s music through an assignment for a religious curriculum publication where she worked.
The ordained Methodist minister and writer eventually made a book pitch to Stookey, and they started interviews in late 2016.
Finley said she’s been alarmed by a rise in Christian nationalism, and sees Stookey’s life trajectory as a move in the opposite direction. As an English student, she also learned what a good biography could do, she said: share one person’s spiritual journey, not to set a specific path for the reader but rather give them a jumping-off point to reflect on their own life.
With so much already published about the trio’s political work, Stookey was surprised by the idea at first, he said. But the intersection between “the heart and politics” kept showing up in his continued songwriting, and he saw the book as an opportunity to explore it with Finley’s theological grounding.
“I knew that that information, that connection between the heart and the day-to-day living, for most people had not received the kind of attention that more publicly given performances had produced,” he said.
Originally, Finley planned to write the book herself and have it finished within a year. Life, national politics and the exploratory process have added more time to the project, but the writers are now three chapters away from completing the book and seeking a publisher.
The chapters begin with concrete anecdotes that are revealed to be metaphors as they progress.
That’s deliberate, drawing from Finley’s philosophy about writing about God and Stookey’s experiences after his conversion.
Excited about his newfound faith, he started proselytizing on stage in the fire-and-brimstone language available to him at the time – “born again,” “the blood of Christ” – which he said made things awkward for his bandmates and alienated parts of their diverse fanbase. In 1976, the BDN reported audience protests of his evangelizing at a Hancock County concert.
Then Stookey realized that, as a songwriter, he had a way to try to reach everyone.
“Welcome to the land of metaphor, where you can speak about the depth of something in terms that allow another person to interpret the depth without suffering the exactitude of the description,” he said.
Looking back at early songs, he’s found surprising consistency in his own messages, but sometimes has been surprised by deeper meanings that only reveal themselves years later.
But it’s harder to write about the present than the past, Stookey said, and applying the outlook to national politics today along with the Trump administration has drawn out their timeline. Still, moving into metaphor is less focused on the present and more timeless, they believe.
“To a certain extent, the more metaphorical you can be, the longer what you have to say will last,” Finley said.
