Episode 109: “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Peter, Paul, and Mary

A history of folk music and 500 songs.

Episode 109

Blowin' in the Wind by Peter, Paul, and Mary.

Today we're going to look at the first manufactured pop band we will see in this story.

But not the last.

A group cynically put together by a manager to try and cash in on a fad, but one who were important enough that in a small way they helped to change history.

We're going to look at the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Movement, at Bob Dylan blossoming into a songwriter and the English folk revival, and at Blowin' in the Wind by Peter Paul and Mary.

How many seas must a white dove sail

before

she sleeps in the sand?

How many times must the cannon balls fly

before

they're forever

band?

Albert Grossman was an unusual figure in the world of folk music.

The folk revival had started out as an idealistic movement, mostly centred on Pete Seeger, and outside a few ultra-commercial acts like the Kingston Trio, most of the people involved were either doing it for the love of the music or as a means of advancing their political goals.

No doubt many of the performers on the burgeoning folk circuit were also quite keen to make money.

There are very few musicians who don't like being able to eat and have a home to live in.

but very few of the people involved were primarily motivated by increasing their income.

Grossman was a different matter.

He was a businessman, and he was interested in money more than anything else, and for that, he was despised by many of the people in the Greenwich Village folk scene.

But he was, nonetheless, someone who was interested in making money from folk music specifically, and in the late 50s and early 60s, this was less of a strange idea than it might have seemed.

We talked back in the episode on drugstore rock and roll about how rock and roll music was starting to be seen as the music of the teenager, and how teenager was, for the first time, becoming a marketing category into which people could be segmented.

But the thing about music that's aimed at a particular age group is that once you're out of that age group, you are no longer the target audience for that music.

Someone who was 16 in 1956 was 20 in 1960, and people in their 20s don't necessarily want to be listening to music aimed at teenagers.

But at the same time, those people didn't want to listen to the music that their parents were listening to.

There's no switch that gets flicked on your 20th birthday, that means you suddenly no longer like Little Richard, but instead like Rosemary Clooney.

So there was a gap in the market for music that was more adult than rock and roll was perceived as being, but which still set itself apart from the pop music that was listened to by people in their 30s and 40s.

And in the late 50s and early 60s, that gap seemed to be filled by a commercialised version of the folk revival.

In particular, Harry Balafonte had a huge run of massive hit albums with collections of folk, calypso, and blues songs, presented in a way that was acceptable to an older, more settled audience, while still preserving some of the rawness of the originals, like his version of Lead Belly's Midnight Special, recorded in 1962 with a young Bob Dylan on Harmonica.

Well, I wake up in the morning,

everything

don't ring.

You go a marching to the table,

you see the same old thing.

Baby, all I wanna tell you.

Meanwhile, the Kingston trio had been having huge hits with cleaned-up versions of old folk ballads like Tom Dooley.

There I took her life.

Met her on the mountain,

stabbed her with my knife.

Hang down your head, Tom, Dooley.

So Grossman believed that there was a real market out there for something that was as clean and bright and friendly as the Kingston Trio, but with just a tiny hint of the Bohemian Greenwich Village atmosphere to go with it.

Something that wouldn't scare T V people and DJs, but which might seem just the tiniest bit more radical than the Kingston Trio did.

Something mass-produced, but which seemed more authentic.

So Grossman decided to put together what we would now call a manufactured pop group.

It would be a bit like the Kingston Trio, but ever so slightly more political, and rather than being three men, it would be two men and a woman.

Grossman had very particular ideas about what he wanted.

He wanted a waifish, beautiful woman at the centre of the group, he wanted a man who brought a sense of folk authenticity, and he wanted someone who could add a comedy element to the performances, to lighten them.

For the woman, he chose Mary Travers, who had been around the folk scene for several years at this point, starting out with a group called the Song Swappers, who had recorded an album of Union songs with with Pete Seeger back in 1955.

inspiration through the workers' blood shall run.

Travers was chosen in part because of her relative shyness.

She had never wanted to be a professional singer, and her introverted nature made her perfect for the image Grossman wanted, an image that was carefully cultivated to the point that when the group were rehearsing in Florida, Grossman insisted Travers stay inside so she wouldn't get a tan and spoil her image.

As the authentic male folk singer, Grossman chose Peter Yarrow, who was the highest profile of the three, as he had performed as a solo artist for a number of years and had appeared on TV and at the Newport Folk Festival, though he had not yet recorded.

And for the comedy element, he chose Noel Stookie, who regularly performed as a comedian around Greenwich Village.

In the group's very slim autobiography, Stookie compares himself to two other comedians on that circuit, Bill Cosby and Woody Allen.

comparisons that were a much better look in 2009 when the book was published than they are today.

Grossman had originally wanted Dave Van Ronk to be the low harmony singer, rather than Stookie, but Van Ronk turned him down flat, wanting no part of a Greenwich Village Kingston trio, though he later said he sometimes looked at his bank account rather wistfully.

The group's name was, apparently, inspired by a line in the old folk song, I Was Born About 10,000 Years Ago, which was recorded by many people, but most famously by Elvis Presley in the 1970s.

I was born about 10,000 years ago.

I looked at God and says, It isn't so.

The Peter, Paul, and Moses from that song became Peter, Paul, and Mary.

Stookie started going by his middle name, Paul, on stage, in order to fit the group name, though he still uses Noel in his daily life.

While Peter, Paul, and Mary were the front people of the group, there were several other people who were involved in the creative process.

The group used a regular bass player, Bill Lee, the father of the filmmaker Spike Lee, who played on all their recordings, as well as many other recordings from Greenwich Village folk musicians.

They also had, as their musical director, a man named Milt Oakun, who came up with their arrangements and helped them choose and shape the material.

Grossman shaped this team into a formidable commercial force.

Almost everyone who talks about Grossman compares him to Colonel Tom Parker, and the comparison is a reasonable one.

Grossman was extremely good at making money for his acts, so long as a big chunk of the money came to him.

There's a story about him signing Odetta, one of the great folk artists of the period, and telling her, you can stay with your current manager and make $100,000 this year, and he'll take 20%,

or you can come with me and make a quarter of a million dollars, but I'll take 50%.

That was the attitude that Grossman took to everyone.

He cut himself into every contract, salami slicing his artists' royalties at each stage.

But it can't be denied that his commercial instincts were sound.

Peter Paul and Mary's first album was a huge success.

The second single from the album, their version of the old weavers song If I Had a Hammer, written by Pete Seeger and Lee Hayes, went to number 10 on the pop charts.

I'd a hammer out of danger,

I'd

And the album itself went to number one and eventually went double platinum, a remarkable feat for a collection of songs that, however prettily arranged, contained a fairly uncompromising selection of music from the folk scene, with songs by Seeger, Dave Van Munk, and Reverend Gary Davis mixing with traditional songs like This Train and originals by Stookie and Yarrow.

Their second album was less successful at first, with its first two singles flopping, but the third, a pretty children's song by Yarrow and his friend Leonard Lipton, went to number two on the pop charts and number one on the adult contemporary charts.

Hunale.

Little Jackie Paper

loved that rascal puff

and brought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff.

Oh, puff the magic derived.

Incidentally, Leonard Lipton, who wrote that lyric, became independently wealthy from the royalties from the song.

and used the leisure that gave him to pursue his passion of inventing 3D projection systems, which which eventually made him an even wealthier man.

If you've seen a 3D film in the cinema in the last couple of decades, it's almost certainly been using the systems Lipton invented.

So, Peter Paul and Mary were big stars and having big hits, and Albert Grossman was constantly on the lookout for more material for them.

And eventually, he found it, and the song that was to make both him, his group, and its writer very, very rich, in the pages of Broadside magazine.

When we left Bob Dylan, he was still primarily a performer, and not really known for his songwriting.

But he had already written a handful of songs, and he was being drawn into the more political side of the folk scene.

In large part this was because of his girlfriend, Susie Rottolo, with whom Dylan was very deeply in love, and who was a very political person indeed.

Dylan had political views, but wasn't particularly driven by them.

Rottolo very much was, and encouraged him to write songs about politics.

For much of early 1962, Dylan was being pulled in two directions at once.

He was writing songs inspired by Robert Johnson and trying to adapt Johnson's style to fit himself, but at the same time he was writing songs like The Death of Emmett Till, about the 1955 murder of a black teenager, which had galvanized the civil rights movement, and The Ballad of Donald White, about a black man on death row.

Dylan would later be very dismissive of these attempts at topicality, saying, I realise now that my reasons and motives behind it were phony.

I didn't have to write it.

I was bothered by many other things that I pretended I wasn't bothered by, in order to write this song about Emmett Till, a person I never even knew.

But at the time they got him a great deal of attention in the small US folk music scene, when they were published in magazines like Broadside and Sing Out, which collected political songs.

Most of these early songs are juvenilia, with a couple of exceptions, like the rather marvellous anti-bomb song, Let Me Die in My Footsteps.

But the song that changed everything for Dylan was a different matter.

Blowing in the Wind was inspired by the melody of the old 19th-century song, No More Auction Block, a song that is often described as a spiritual, though in fact it's a purely secular song about slavery.

That song had seen something of a revival in folk circles in the late 50s, especially because part of its melody had been incorporated into another song, We Shall Overcome, which had become an anthem of the civil rights movement when it was revived and adapted by Pete Seeger.

We shall overcome,

we shall overcome,

we shall overcome

some

day

O

Dylan took this melody, with its associations with the fight for the rights of black people, and came up with new lyrics, starting with the line, How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?

He wrote two verses of the song, the first and last verses, in a short burst of inspiration, and a few weeks later came back to it and added another verse, the second, which incorporated allusions to the biblical prophet Ezekiel, and which is notably less inspired than those earlier verses.

In later decades, many people have looked at the lyrics to the song and seen it as the first of what would become a whole sub-genre of non-protest protest songs.

They've seen the abstraction of how many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man as being nice sounding rhetoric that doesn't actually mean anything, in much the same way as something like, say, Another Day in Paradise, or Eve of Destruction, songs that make nonspecific complaints about nonspecific bad things.

But while Blowin' in the Wind is a song that has multiple meanings and can be applied to multiple situations, as most good songs can, that line was, at the time in which it was written, a very concrete question.

The civil rights movement was asking for many things, for the right to vote, for an end to segregation, for an end to police brutality, but also for basic respect and acknowledgement of black people's shared humanity.

We've already heard in a couple of past episodes Big Bill Brunsy singing, When Do I Get to Be Called a Man?

Yes, I wanna win.

Yes, I wanna win.

Well, I get to be called a man.

I do have to wait till I get 93

when Uncle Sam called me.

I knowed I'd be called a real McCoy.

But it wasn't no different than just call me soldier boy, I wonder when.

Because at the time, it was normal for white people to refer to black men as boy.

As Dr.

Martin Luther King said in his letter from Birmingham Jail, one of the greatest pieces of writing of the 20th century, a letter in large part about how white moderates were holding black people back with demands to be reasonable and let things take their time.

When you have seen hateful policemen curse, kick, brutalise, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity, when you see the vast majority of your twenty million negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society,

when your first name becomes, and here Dr.

King uses a racial slur which I, as a white man, will not say, and your middle name becomes boy, however old you are, and your last name becomes John, and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title Mrs., when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments, when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of nobodiness, then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair.

King's great letter was written in 1963, less than a year after Dylan was writing his song, but before it became widely known.

In the context of 1962, the demand to call a man a man was a very real political issue, not an aphorism that could go in a Hallmark card.

Dylan recorded the song in June 1962, during the sessions for his second album, which at the time was going under the working title Bob Dylan's Blues.

How many roads must a man walk down

How many seas must the white dove sail

before

she sleeps in the sand?

Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly

before

their forever band.

The answer, my friend,

By the time he recorded it, two major changes had happened to him.

The first was that Susie Rotolo had travelled to Spain for several months, leaving him bereft.

For the next few months, his songwriting took a turn towards songs about either longing for the return of a lost love, like Tomorrow is a Long Time, one of his most romantic songs, or about how the protagonist doesn't even need his girlfriend anyway, and she can leave if she likes to see if he cares, Like, don't think twice it's alright.

The other change was that Albert Grossman had become his manager, largely on the strength of Blowin' in the Wind, which Grossman thought had huge potential.

Grossman signed Dylan up, taking 20% of all his earnings, including on the contract with Columbia Records Dylan already had, and got him signed to a new publisher, Whitmark Publishing, where the aptly named Artie Mogul thought that Blowin' in the Wind could be marketed.

Grossman took his 20% of Dylan's share of the songwriting money as his commission from Dylan, and 50% of Whitmark's share of the money as his commission from Whitmark, meaning that Dylan was getting 40% of the money for writing the songs, while Grossman was getting 35%.

Grossman immediately got involved in the recording of Dylan's second album, and started having personality clashes with John Hammond.

It was apparently Grossman who suggested that Dylan go electric for the first time, with the late 1962 single Mixed Up Confusion.

They're just too many

people,

and they're all too hard to please.

Neither Hammond nor Dylan liked that record, and it seemed clear for the moment that the way forward for Dylan was to continue in an acoustic folk vein.

Dylan was also starting to get inspired more by English folk music, and incorporate borrowings from English music into his songwriting.

That's most apparent in A Hard Rain's Are Gonna Fall, written in September 1962.

Dylan took the structure of that song from the old English ballad Lord Randall.

I've been to the wild wood mother, mark my bed soon.

For I'm weary way hunting, and I fain would lie doon

or got

He reworked that structure into a song of apocalypse, again full of the biblical imagery he'd tried in the second verse of Blowing in the Wind, but this time more successfully incorporating it.

And where have ye been, my darling young one?

I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains

I've walked and I crawled on six crooked highways

his interest in English folk music was to become more important in his songwriting in the following months as Dylan was about to travel to the UK and encounter the British folk music scene.

A TV director called Philip Saville had seen Dylan performing in New York and had decided he would be perfect for the role of a poet in a TV play he was putting on, Madhouse in Castle Street, and got Dylan flown over to perform in it.

Unfortunately, no one seems to have told Dylan what would be involved in this, and he proved incapable of learning his lines or acting, so the show was rethought.

The role of the poet was given to David Warner, later to become one of Britain's most famous screen actors, and Dylan was cast in a new role as a singer called Bobby, who had few or no lines, but did get to sing a few songs, including Blowin' in the Wind, which was the first time the song was heard by anyone outside of the New York folk scene.

Dylan was in London for about a month, and while he was there, he immersed himself in the British folk scene.

This scene was in some ways modelled on the American scene, and had some of the same people involved, but it was very different.

The initial spark for the British folk revival had come in the late 1940s, when A.

L.

Lloyd, a member of the Communist Party, had published a book of folk songs he'd collected, along with some Marxist analysis of how folk songs evolved.

In the early fifties, Alan Lomax, then in the UK to escape McCarthyism, put Lloyd in touch with Ewan McCall, a songwriter and performer from Manchester, who we heard earlier singing Lord Randall.

McCall, like Lloyd, was a Communist, but the two also shared a passion for older folk songs, and they began recording and performing together, recording traditional songs like The Handsome Cabin Boy.

She dressed herself in sailors close, or so it does appear,

McColl and Lloyd latched onto the skiffle movement, and McCall started his own club night, Ballads and Blues, which tried to push the skifflers in the direction of performing more music based in English traditional music.

This had already been happening to an extent with things like the Vipers performing Maggie Mae, a song about a sex worker in Liverpool.

I was very soon taken in by a gal with

But this started to happen a lot more with McCall's encouragement.

At one point in 1956, there was even a TV show hosted by Lomax and featuring a band that included Lomax, McCall, Jim Bray, the bass player from Chris Barber's band, Shirley Collins, a folk singer who was also Lomax's partner, and Peggy Seeger, who was Pete Seeger's sister.

and who had also entered into a romantic relationship with McCall, whose most famous song, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, was written both about and for her.

The first time

ever I saw your face,

I thought the sun rose in your eyes,

and the moon and the stars were the gift you gave

It was Seeger who instigated what became the most notable feature at the Ballads and Blues Club and its successor, the Singers' Club.

She burst out laughing when she saw Lung John Baldry sing Rock Island Line, because he was attempting to sing it in an American accent.

As someone who had actually known Lead Belly, she found British imitations of his singing ludicrous, and soon there was a policy at the clubs that people would only sing songs that were originally originally sung with their normal vowel sounds.

So Sega could only sing songs from the east coast of the US, because she didn't have the western vowels of a Woody Guthrie, while McCall could sing English and Scottish songs, but nothing from Wales or Ireland.

As the skiffle craze died down, it splintered into several linked scenes.

We've already seen how in Liverpool and London it spawned guitar groups like the Shadows and the Beatles, while in London it also led to the electric blues scene.

It also led to a folk scene that was very linked to the blues scene at first, but was separate from it, and which was far more political, centred around McCull.

That scene, like the US one, combined topical songs about political events from a far left viewpoint, with performances of traditional songs, but in the case of the British one, these were mostly old sea shanties and sailors' songs, and the ancient child ballads, rather than Appalachian country music, though a lot of the songs have similar roots.

And unlike the blues scene, the folk scene spread all over the country.

There were clubs in Manchester, in Liverpool, run by the group of the Spinners, in Bradford, in Hull, run by the Waterson family, and most other major British cities.

The musicians who played these venues were often inspired by MacCall and Lloyd, but the younger generation of musicians often looked askance at what they saw as MacCall's dogmatic approach, preferring to just make good music rather than submit it to what they saw as McCall's ideological purity test, even as they admired his musicianship and largely agreed with his politics.

And one of those younger musicians was a guitarist named Martin Carthy, who was playing a club called The King and Queen on Goodge Street when he saw Bob Dylan walk in.

He recognised Dylan from the cover of Sing Out magazine and invited him to get up on stage and do a few numbers.

For the next few weeks, Carthy showed Dylan round the folk scene.

Dylan went down great at the venues where Carthy normally played and at the roundhouse, but flopped around the venues that were dominated by McCall, as the people there seemed to think of Dylan as a sort of court-rate rambling Jack Elliott, as Elliot had been such a big part of the Skiffle and folk scenes.

Carthy also taught Dylan a number of English folk songs, including Lord Franklin.

Swinging in my harbour

cry about the sea.

I dreamed a dream

and I thought it a true

concerning Franklin

and his

gallant

and Scarborough Fair.

Are you going

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, in time.

Remember me to a large village there.

For once, she was a true love of mine.

Tell her to make me a cambric shirt,

parsley, sage, rosemary, and time

without any

Dylan immediately incorporated the music he'd learned from Carthy into his songwriting, basing Bob Dylan's dream on Lord Franklin, and even more closely basing Girl from the North Country on Scarborough Fair.

Remember me to one who lives there

For she once was a true love of mine

After his trip to London, Dylan went over to Europe to see if he could catch up with Susie but she had already gone back to New York.

Their letters to each other crossed in the post.

On his return, they reunited at least for a while, and she posed with him for the photo for the cover of what was to be his second album.

Dylan had thought that album completed when he left for England, but he soon discovered that there were problems with the album.

The record label didn't want to release the comedy-talking blues Talking John Birch Society paranoid blues, because they thought it might upset the fascists in the John Birch Society.

The same thing would later make sure that Dylan never played the Ed Sullivan show, because when he was booked onto the show, he insisted on playing that song, and so they cancelled the booking.

In this case, though, it gave him an excuse to remove what he saw as the weakest songs on the album, including Tomorrow is a Long Time, and replace them with four new songs, three of them inspired by traditional English folk songs: Bob Dylan's Dream, Girl from the North Country, and Masters of War, which took its melody from the old folk song Nottamontown, popularised on the British folk circuit by an American singer, Gene Ritchie.

In Nottamontown,

not a soul would look up,

not a soul would look up,

not a soul would look down,

not a soul would look up,

not a soul would look down

to show me the way to Nottingham Town.

I rode a grey horse, it was called a grey mare,

grey mane and grey tail, a green striped on her back.

These new recordings weren't produced by John Hammond, as the rest of the the album was.

Albert Grossman had been trying from the start to get total control over Dylan, and didn't want Hammond, who had been around before Grossman, involved in Dylan's career.

Instead, a new producer named Tom Wilson was in charge.

Wilson was a remarkable man, but seemed an odd fit for a left-wing folk album.

He was one of the few black producers working for a major label, though he'd started out as an indie producer.

He was a Harvard economics graduate, and had been president of the Young Republicans during his time there.

He remained a conservative all his life, but he was far from conservative in his musical tastes.

When he'd left university, he borrowed $900 and started his own record label, Transition, which had put out some of the best experimental jazz of the 50s, produced by Wilson, including the debut albums by Sun Ra.

And Cecil Taylor.

Wilson later described his first impressions of Dylan.

I didn't even particularly like folk music.

I'd been recording Sunra and Coltrane.

I thought folk music was for the dumb guys.

This guy played like the dumb guys,

but then these words came out.

I was flabbergasted.

Wilson would soon play a big part in Dylan's career, but for now his job was just to get those last few tracks for the album recorded.

In the end, the final recording session for Dylan's second album was more than a year after the first one, and it came out into a very different context from when he started recording it.

Because while Dylan was putting the finishing touches on his second album, Peter Paul and Mary were working on their third, and they were encouraged by Grossman to record three Bob Dylan songs, since that way Grossman would make more money from them.

Their version of Blowin' in the Wind came out as a single a few weeks after The Free Wheel in Bob Dylan came out and sold 300,000 copies in the first week.

The record went to number two on the charts, and their follow-up, Don't Think Twice It's All Right, another Dylan song, went top ten as well.

Blowin' in the Wind became an instant standard, and was especially picked up by black performers as it became a civil rights anthem.

Mavis Staples of the Staplesingers said later that she was astonished that a white man could write a line like, How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?

saying, That's what my father experienced.

And the staplesingers recorded it, of course.

How many rose must the man walk down

before

you call him a man?

Yes, how many seas must the white dove sail

before she's sleeping herself

in the fray.

How many times must the cannonball fly?

As did Sam Cook.

Before they're forever banned,

no, the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

The answer blowing in the wind.

How many times must a man look up

before he sees the sky?

Tell me,

how many ears must a one man

have

and Steve Wonder

Before He's allowed

to be free

already now.

How many times

can a man

turn his head

and he pretends that he just

occurred

But the song's most important performance came from Peter Paul and Mary performing it on a bill with Dylan, Odetta, Joan Baez, and Mahalia Jackson in August 1963, just as the song had started to descend the charts.

Because those artists were the entertainment for the March on Washington, in which more than a quarter of a million people descended on Washington both to support President Kennedy's civil rights bill and to speak out and say that it wasn't going far enough.

That was one of the great moments in American political history, full of incendiary speeches like the one by John Lewis.

What did the federal government do when Auburn and Deputy Sheriff beat Attorney C.B.

King and left him half dead?

What did the federal government do when local police officials kicked and assaulted the pregnant wife of Slater King and she lost her baby?

Those who have said be patient and wait, we must say that we cannot be patient.

We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now.

But the most memorable moment at that march came when Dr.

King was giving his speech.

Mahalia Jackson shouted out, Tell them about the dream, Martin, and King departed from his prepared words and instead improvised based on themes he'd used in other speeches previously, coming out with some of the most famous words ever spoken.

I have a dream

that one day on the Red Hills of Georgia,

the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream

that one day

even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice,

sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream.

The civil rights movement was more than one moment, however inspiring, and white people like myself have a tendency to reduce it just to Dr.

King, and to reduce Dr.

King just to those words, which is one reason why I quoted from Letter from Birmingham Jail earlier, as that is a much less safe and canonised piece of writing.

But it's still true to say that if there is a single most important moment in the history of the post-war struggle for black rights, it was that moment, and because of Blowin' in the Wind, both Dylan and Peter Paul and Mary were minor parts of that event.

After 1963, Peter Paul and Mary quickly became passe with the British invasion, only having two more top ten hits, one with the novelty song in 1967 and one with Leaving on a Jet Plane in 1969.

They split up in 1970, and around that time Yarrow was arrested and convicted for a sexual offence involving a 14-year-old girl, though he was later pardoned by President Carter.

The group reformed in 1978 and toured the Nostalgia Circuit until Mary's death in 2009.

The other two still occasionally performed together, as Peter and Noel Paul.

Bob Dylan, of course, went on to bigger things after blowing in the wind suddenly made him into the voice of a generation, a position he didn't ask for and didn't seem to want.

We'll be hearing much more from him, and we'll also be hearing more about the struggle for black civil rights, as that's a story, much like Dylan's, that continues to this day.

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