Music to Life
by Linda J. Morris
Reprinted by permission from "Dirty Linen," The Magazine of Folk and World Music (http://www.dirtylinen.com)
Amazing, maybe even miraculous! What began as a simple, but touching song, written by Noel Paul Stookey for a friend’s wedding, has acquired a life of its own, inspiring the music community and earning millions of dollars to benefit worthy causes, great and small. Stookey and his daughter Elizabeth S. Sunde are still awed by the power of “The Wedding Song,” a mega hit for Peter, Paul, and Mary more than 30 years ago. “It was part of this piece of music that a friend asked you to bless his wedding by — then all of a sudden there’s a million, two million dollars coming in as a result of publishing it,” Stookey recalled. The gentle, loving lyrics and delicate melody became a “must learn” for any artist performing at a wedding, anniversary, or family gathering, causing the royalties to pour in. However, Stookey wasn’t comfortable just pocketing the earnings.
“ ‘The Wedding Song’ was a piece of music resulting from prayer, and then when it came time to assign ownership to it, it was rather an embarrassing moment,” he explained. “A decision had to be made as to whether I was going to put the name ‘God’ or me as the writer of the song or whether I was going to turn it over to public domain.
“Public domain, as Pete Seeger will tell you, is a funny kind of term. In many instances, people who actually created tunes, and never got around to copyrighting them, lost the tunes through the spread of their popularity to the general public, and those became tunes in the public domain. Also, songs which generally pass out of copyright protection eventually become part of the public lexicon and then become part of the public domain. But in this particular instance, I started a foundation called Public Domain so that when the monies came in for ‘The Wedding Song,’ which, I gotta tell you, was pretty astounding anyway, I’d be able to spend the Public Domain Foundation money in much the same spirit as the song was received.”
Stookey actually began dispersing the royalty checks about a year before launching the foundation in 1971. As the requests for donations arrived, he considered the merits of each. “That is to say, you’re holding this letter up in front of you, which asks for 46 dollars and 27 cents to repair a roof on an Alabama church, and you go ‘Amen! That’s a righteous cause!’ and you write them a check, and then another one comes for $10,000 for the study of tooth decay, and you go, ‘Eh, I’ll let the AMA take care of that.’ Then you move that way through all of the requests for money; it was a continuum spiritual experience,” he said. And he proceeded in that fashion for the next 20 years.
“Around
1990, although the monies were pretty steadily
still coming in, they weren’t coming
in the volume as when the song was still in
its heyday. My daughter began to evidence
an interest in not only being in the nonprofit
sector, helping agencies that help other people,
but also, in particular, she voiced an interest
in Public Domain Foundation,” Stookey
said.
Part of the new, more pragmatic generation, Sunde had become a management consultant, advisor, and analyst for nonprofit organizations. She recalls how she became involved in PDF. “He did say to me about eight years ago, ‘Liz, at some point, especially giving the direction you’ve chosen in life to work with nonprofit groups, I’m probably going to want you to take this over.’ And I thought about it for a minute and said, ‘Dad, I should probably do that now.’
“Basically, when he started the foundation, it was a pass-through: ‘Let’s take all the money and give it all away every year!’ ” That was the operating principle — not a marvel of strategic planning, Sunde acknowledged, but she also recognized the enormous potential for good.
Her thought was to make the foundation a genuine living legacy for her father. “But he was really not comfortable with that idea. It was just a very humble enterprise for him: ‘I don’t need any recognition… just give all the money away.’ And I’m looking at it as an incredible opportunity to inspire other people,” she said, “and for Dad to become a model for other musicians.”
After several planning sessions and an analysis of how the money had been distributed, she found that the donations reflected her father’s life journey. “In the early 70s, they were all about religious issues,” she said. Then they started broadening out to issues of poverty and family, a home for runaway kids, Oxfam, nursing homes… “It was really about family stability,” which remains one of the focuses. “We want to help families in whatever shape they take be strong,” Sunde said. That involves issues of daycare, job training, welfare-to-work issues, and, eventually, programs for children and youth. The more specific concerns lately have been involving urban families.
Sunde became the foundation’s executive director, and to that position, she brought her own value system, which was an outgrowth of family ethics. “I actually wrote a paper in graduate school about the culture in our household. And I would say it was definitely kind of a folk culture in a sense that there was a lot of singing and music of all kinds. But none of us pursued music to any great extent, although we all had kind of good voices, and we would do a lot of family singing. But we never did a Stookey Sisters Trio, and we would joke about that.
“Dad did a really good job on the one hand of introducing music to us, and on the other hand, making sure we felt free to pursue whatever we needed to pursue outside of his shadow. He was very respectful of the paths we all wanted to follow, and they ended up being not music.” Still, the influence was undeniable, even at an early age. “My dad tells the story about when I was five or six, we were at an outdoor concert of Peter, Paul, and Mary, and they were singing ‘If I Had a Hammer,’ and I actually found an old rusty hammer. At some point I came running up onstage with it.” The audience loved her “solution to the problem posed by the song,” but one has to wonder if PP&M could ever again perform that piece with straight faces.
Although music as a vehicle for social awareness and change was part of the ethical fabric at home, Stookey never forced his children to participate in protests or marches. However, Sunde said, “We fully appreciated the role that he and his colleagues and folk music had played in social change… He was very protective of us…but all three sisters ended up supporting social causes.”
In fine-tuning the foundation’s direction, Stookey and Sunde reestablished connections with artist like Tom Paxton and Christine Lavin and held “friend-raisers” to solicit ideas. “Those were great; we got some really good feedback. But we wanted to link musicians to causes, be an advisor, create a community foundation concept where a singer/songwriter donates a song and says any proceeds should be channeled to [a selected beneficiary].” Rather than a geographic area as a defining realm, Sunde wanted the scope to be music on a borderless scale..
Combining the ideal of music and social justice, Sunde almost single-handedly developed the Music to Life songwriting contest, staged at the Kerrville Folk Festival, Texas, in 2001 and 2003. The event has become a mecca for songwriters who feel strongly about social issues and express that through their music. “Her concept was to reawaken songwriters’ interest in causes,” Stookey said. The first contest drew about 140 applicants. “The songs were listened to by a board of judges, also including, for nepotistic reasons, Peter [Yarrow], Mary [Travers], and myself. Then Tom Paxton said that he would help judge, and Len Chandler, a longtime songwriting maven from the West Coast. Tom Chapin and Cheryl Wheeler were also part of the original crew.” Since then, they augmented the list with Judy Collins, Christine Lavin, and Holly Near.
Ten
finalists are chosen, and out of the 10, three
of them are awarded prize money, which goes
to the cause of their choice. “On a
less-obvious level, my daughter then spends
some time linking those songs up with the
concerns that they most identify with.”For
example, the 2001 winner, David Zee’s “Children
of Conflict,” earned $1,000 for Seeds
of Peace in New York City. “Now they
know that there’s a song that expresses
their particular concern, and if they’d
want to do a fundraiser, or they want to take
it on as a minute commercial, music behind
some pictures, then Liz has been acting as
a broker for this material.
“For the 2003 contest, there were over 270 entries,” Stookey said. “And just because a song didn’t earn the most judges’ votes, that doesn’t mean it will be overlooked. Peter, Mary, and I took two tunes from the 2001 submissions, and they both became tracks on our new album [In These Times]. It has a song called ‘Jesus on the Wire’ and also has ‘Of This World,’ and those were two contestants, but not prizewinners.” All the other judges have the same access to the songs, he said.
The entries in Music to Life run the gamut of social and personal issues, and Stookey has seen the approach broaden through the decades. Folk festivals of the 60s, during the civil rights and the antiwar movements, created an intensity of purpose. “Those two movements spawned a lot of music that paid particular attention to hypocrisy, to the politics, to the concerns of the times. Since then, folk music has broadened considerably, and, I think, much of it good. It’s a toss-up sometimes when you look at the direction that popular music has gone and try to decide whether it is more valuable to sing of personal anguish and grief that’s translatable to a social concern. I think sometimes that’s a preferential way of expressing a community concern: Talk about the individual’s responsibility and how the individual has been impacted by certain situations.
“In other instances, as it was in the early 60s, it’s better to address the situation directly and speak about it not as a person who is suffering, but almost as a litany of facts. Those two contrasts can be seen in a song that we did called ‘El Salvador,’that basically just lists the oppressive nature of the governmental regime that was supported by the United States in the 80s and had less to do with a personal story. Whereas Bob Chabot’s song [‘I’m Not Gonna Say My Name,’ the 2003 second-place winner] is from the point of view of an orphan, it’s a very strong statement, and that opens up a whole field of discussion about foster parenting, about orphanages in general.”
The connection also has inspired some artists to take their messages “on the road,” exemplifying the foundation’s ideals.
Rachel
Garlin, whose song “Alternative Fuel” was
a 2003 finalist, and Melissa Crabtree drove
a “Veggie Van” from Berkeley,
California, to Jacksonville, Florida, “[We]
drove across the country playing music and
telling people about alternatives to petroleum,” she
said. The Ford Econoline had two tanks. “One
tank used bio-diesel gas (a mixture of recycled
vegetable oil, methyl, and lye), and the other
tank ran on straight recycled French-fry grease
(pumped and filtered from the kitchens of
restaurants and venues where we played). Our
van got 20 miles to the gallon, and its exhaust
smelled like French fries (no joke!).” The
van has since been donated to a school in
Mendocino, California, for educational purposes.
And Eric Hansen, whose song “Hero
in the Dark” was also a 2003 finalist,
became an email penpal, friend, mentor, and
musician-in-residence for 18 second-graders
in Baltimore City, visiting them from his
home in Tucson, Arizona, twice, mostly at
his own expense. His dedication not only brought
live music into the classroom, but his unfailing
care provided an experience of a lifetime
for these inner city children, reinforcing
their faith in a caring adult world.
The foundation has started Music to Life workshops,
with the New England Regional Folk Alliance,
to encourage songwriting for social change.
And Sunde has set a goal of acquiring a fund
of a quarter-million dollars. To that end, PDF
has been granted an advance of $75,000, to be
paid from royalties from “The Wedding
Song,” which continues to earn tens of
thousands of dollars yearly. (It was sung by
Della Reese on “Touched by an Angel” and
also aired on “The Wonder Years.”) “I’m
eager to be in that position where we’re
a genuine grant-making organization,” she
said.
Public Domain Foundation also serves as a charitable consulting service, or clearinghouse, for musicians wishing to connect with nonprofit groups. “I can do all of that quality assurance — I know a lot about what a good nonprofit looks like,” she said. And PDF remains an educational resource, as well as a role model of charitable giving through the proceeds of “The Wedding Song.”
“I just really love this path we’re on. What charges me up about the foundation and where the foundation is headed is the idea that Public Domain can aspire to become a resource and reference point and a home for musicians that want to continue that tradition of social change through music. My vision — my dream dream — would be to have the Grammies honor a song of social significance — and to have us be involved in this. What’s happening is the songwriters feel this urgency to communicate theses causes and have an impact.”
Stookey would call that “songs for advocacy.” “Folk music has always had a rather broad base for definition, and, therefore, I think it encompasses all of this social concern. The encouragement of the Music to Life contest is to remind the songwriters and the singer/songwriters that there is a world of hurt out there, and music is a great way to achieve a community perception of what needs to be done to alleviate that.