Peter, Paul and Mary is the first album by Peter, Paul and Mary, released in 1962 on Warner Bros. Records. Released in both mono and stereo on catalog no. 1449, It is one of the rare folk albums to reach US#1 – staying for over a month. The lead-off singles “If I Had a Hammer” and “Lemon Tree” reached numbers 10 and 35 respectively on the Billboard Pop Singles chart. It was the group’s biggest selling studio album, eventually certified Double Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for U.S. sales of more than two million copies. (More from Wikipedia)
Songwriting credits were not handled so scrupulously back then anyway, and those practices continued at least through the end of the 1960’s.
On the first LP by Peter, Paul and Mary, Peter, Paul and Mary (1962) – one of the few folk music albums to reach Number One on the Billboard album charts – Peter Yarrow is shown as the writer of “This Train” (this gospel song dates back at least as far as 1927 and had been a hit in the 1930’s for Sister Rosetta Tharpe); Yarrow and Paul Stookey are said to have written “Sorrow” (better known by its full name “Man of Constant Sorrow” or “Maid of Constant Sorrow” and dating from 1913, both Bob Dylan and Judy Collins recorded it in the same time period, and “Man of Constant Sorrow” was also prominently featured in the 2000 film O Brother Where Art Thou); and “If I Had My Way” shows a songwriter of Rev. Gary Davis (earlier versions of this traditional song exist under the probable original name “Samson and Delilah”, “If I Had My Way I’d Tear the Building Down” and “Oh Lord If I Had My Way”, the latter by Blind Willie Johnson from 1927).
(February 2015)
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Items: Peter, Paul and Mary
