Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin

THOUGH I HADN'T YET been born during the Great Folk Scare of the early 1960s, I'd like to think that if I'd had a hammer back then, I'd have chucked it at the heads of Peter, Paul & Mary. This is admittedly not a charitable impulse, nor one of which I'm proud. But it can hardly be helped considering the sheer number of musical/political atrocities they have visited upon our culture.

As popularizers of others' songs, they are partly to blame for the careers of John Denver and Gordon Lightfoot. As a solo artist, Noel Paul Stookey is responsible for the ubiquitous soundtrack of every middlebrow wedding, "The Wedding Song (There is Love)," while Peter Yarrow co-wrote the Me-Decade chestnut "Torn Between Two Lovers." With their whole-earth harmonic bleating and self-congratulatory preening, even their album titles ("Peter, Paul, & Mommy, Too," "Songs of Conscience & Concern") make one yearn for a good old-fashioned record-burning. Peter, Paul & Mary--"PPM" to the fans--can take a pro-marijuana song like "Puff the Magic Dragon" (in which Puff's dealer, "Little Jackie Paper," brings the doobie-smoking dragon "sealing wax and other fancy stuff," as they suspiciously frolic in "the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee") and transform it into a sanctimonious morality tale. Yarrow, the song's author, has angrily insisted it's "not about drugs," but rather "the sadness of lost childhood innocence."

Lost childhood innocence is a subject Yarrow knows something about. In 1970, when he was in his early thirties, he pleaded guilty to "taking immoral and improper liberties" with a 14-year-old girl. He did three months of a one-to-three year prison term, and was later granted a full pardon by President Jimmy Carter. Still, even though he's proven a stable family man since, one might reasonably assume that this record would preclude Yarrow from spending lots of time around elementary and middle schools. One would be wrong.

For after 40 years as a political activist, Yarrow has now undertaken a campaign that he hopes will be his lasting legacy. This time, it's for the kids. As freedom fighters, PPM started out strong, singing alongside Martin Luther King in the March on Washington. But as their careers got longer, the issues got smaller. By the '80s, they were singing the praises of the Sandinistas. In the early '90s, Yarrow wrote a song using the words of another King--Rodney, not Martin. By 1996, Yarrow was spotted giving a benefit concert to support continued federal funding of Amtrak.

But in 1999, Yarrow's life and, consequently, the lives of millions of American schoolchildren were transformed. At the Kerrville Folk Festival, Yarrow heard a hit country song entitled "Don't Laugh At Me," which he decided to turn into an anti-bullying anthem, thus launching a movement. While the lyrics had been written by somebody else, they are PPM-pitch-perfect: "I'm a little boy with glasses, the one they call a geek / A little girl who never smiles cause I have braces on my teeth / and I know how it feels / to cry myself to sleep." From there, things really get maudlin, spiraling into the chorus: "Don't laugh at me / Don't call me names / Don't get your pleasure from my pain . . ." Yarrow has said he "shed a tear" the first time he heard the song. It reminded him of his own painful experiences being bullied by a football player: "He would call me [names]. That was very humiliating," Yarrow said. He was in college at the time.