Who: Peter, Paul & Mary.
When: 8 p.m., through Sunday.
Where: The Orleans Showroom.
Tickets: $66, $77, $88.
Information: 365-7075.
Take it from a folk legend:
"You're talking to the third of the group who is thankful for a spiritual rebirth," 64-year-old Noel Paul Stookey said.
The other two-thirds of that group are Peter Yarrow and Mary Travers. They are known collectively as Peter, Paul & Mary, one of the most successful folk singing groups of all time.
The trio will be at The Orleans Showroom through Sunday, more than 42 years after they joined voices at Greenwich Village's Bitter End Coffee House in New York City.
They have performed together for most of those years, but for a seven-year break in the '70s, when each sought their own destiny. They reunited in 1978.
Stookey was speaking by telephone from his home on the campus of a prep school in northwestern Massachusetts. Talking to him is what one might expect -- a winding, abstract journey through philosophies, activism and the relevance of folk music.
While many activists of the '60s cut their hair (or lost it) and joined the mainstream of society, the middle member of Peter, Paul & Mary has remained true to his songs.
Stookey's Christian conversion occurred in 1968, at a time when the era of love and peace was giving way to something more foreboding.
"What began as a kind of hopeful, naive innocence in the early '60s was perverted by drugs and the sobering realization that truth had more than one hat, one of them objective and one of them subjective," Stookey said.
Stookey is a deeply introspective man, one who has clung to the ideals that more or less galvanized the love-and-peace generation and propelled Peter, Paul & Mary to the vanguard of a movement that, for a time, changed the world.
The trio first met in New York City in 1960, performed publicly for the first time in 1961, and recorded its first album, "Peter, Paul and Mary" in 1962. According to Billboard Magazine the album was in the Top 10 for 10 months, remained in the Top 20 for two years, and did not drop off the Hot 100 albums charts until 3 1/2 years after its release.
Peter, Paul & Mary didn't merely give lip service to the passionate causes of the '60s. In 1963 they marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala. They actively opposed the Vietnam War, frequently performing at anti-war demonstrations.
College campuses were their dais.
It is fitting that Stookey would be found today living on a campus, where young, idealistic minds are being shaped.
Stookey's wife, Elizabeth, graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1997 and was chosen as the first woman chaplain at the Northfield (Mass.) Mount Hermon prep school.
"Living on a campus is a perfect fit," Stookey said.
He says folk music has kept him young and helps him relate to the teenagers who surround him.
"I feel like bouncing around a lot more than most people who are 64," Stookey said. "I lay my mental attitude at the feet of folk music."
And folk music transcends the boy-meets-girl focus of many pop songs.
"Folk music is 'info-tainment.' It is instructional, political and spiritual," he said. "It's an amazing art form. No other form of music lets a community discuss matters of how the government is run. Not that rock 'n' roll and rap don't get angry about the government, but folk music, stylistically, seems to encourage a kind of listening and participation."
Stookey said the musical mold was broken in the '60s, "when people discovered they could sing about anything. Music became a forum, a town hall."
So are Peter, Paul & Mary concerts strictly '60s nostalgia?
"We've been given the responsibility as well as the opportunity to share the manner in which folk music is still relevant," Stookey said. "In some cases this means singing some of the old songs, like 'Blowin' in the Wind.'
"I would say one-third of the songs would please fans strictly for nostalgia. About one-third are songs we have done since our 1978 reunion and one-third are brand new."
The trio will also demonstrate their individual talents with a number of solos.
"That's so people can hear the three voices individually and they can get a sense of what each of us sounds like," Stookey said. "They can get a real sense of our synergy."
It is a synergy that has endured for generations, remaining constant while social issues change.
For Stookey, some of the changes have been for the better.
"From my persepctive, I'm pleased that all over the world, the sense of the spiritual value of humankind is more connective," Stookey said.
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