The world lost a great folk singer last week. Peter Yarrow is best known for his work with Peter Paul and Mary, but he had a special connection to Newtown, Connecticut. Two months after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, Yarrow helped organize a concert to help bring the community together.
Francine Wheeler is a singer and music teacher who worked closely with Yarrow. In 2010, Yarrow served as a guest artist for The Flagpole Radio Café, a variety show that Wheeler does with her husband in Newtown.
In 2012, Wheeler lost her 6-year-old son, Ben, in the Sandy Hook shooting. Another son at the school survived.
After the shooting, Yarrow kept calling her, trying to reach out.
“I just wasn't able to return his calls,” she recalled in a conversation with Connecticut Public. “He got through to a mutual friend, and he said, ‘I just want to come over to your house.’”
She let him into her home and they sat down.
Yarrow told her: “I'd like to sing with you.”
Wheeler responded: “I've only sung by myself since Ben's death and I don't know if anything will come out of me.”
He replied: “Oh, it will come out of you. It will come out of you.”
They sang all sorts of songs associated with Peter, Paul and Mary, as well as Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie and Peter Seeger.
Yarrow told her: “Francine, I want us to sing this for Newtown.”
“My son was just buried,” she responded. “What are you…?”
“You can do it,” he told her. “And I'm going to bring in my friend, Dar Williams.”
“Dar Williams? I love Dar Williams,” Wheeler responded.
“Oh yes, we'll bring in everybody that we can,” Yarrow said. “We're going to sing for your boy, and we're going to sing for all those children, all those teachers who died. And we're going to sing for bullies, and we're going to sing for every child that's never heard. And all the surviving children, like your son who survived the shooting.”
“I just kind of sat there,” she recalled. “He made it all happen.”
Soon, they were preparing for the 2013 Concert for Newtown, held two months after the mass shooting.
“One of the greatest lessons that Peter taught me was how grief can be sung,” Wheeler said. “Because grief is love that has nowhere to go. And I knew that if I could keep loving Ben, I could stay alive.
“And I also knew, in those early days, that if I could sing, I could stay alive.”
‘Let your love cover me’
Yarrow and Williams suggested they sing a song called “Family.”
“It couldn't have been more of a perfect song,” Wheeler said. “Because it's all about that child: ‘Let your love cover me.’ It’s all about love and loving each other.”
As they rehearsed, Wheeler was concerned she’d break down from crying and wouldn’t be able to finish the song.
Williams told her: “I’ll try to sing.”
During the concert, as Williams welcomed Wheeler to the stage, the crowd clapped and many stood up. And then they sang:
Let your love cover me,
Like a pair of angel wings,
You are my family,
You are my family.
Wheeler said when she was on stage, she felt the audience was carrying her.
“And they were saying, ‘We are with you.’ There were other parents of victims in the audience. There were all of our legislators. Our senator was there. People were there and saying, ‘We'll carry you.’ And I think that’s how I got through it.”
You can also see the love and the grief. I just said ‘I’m going to share it with you.’ That’s my activism; it’s just sharing with you the rawness of this moment.
“And Peter just cheered me on.”
Teaching many lessons
Peter, Paul and Mary, inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2006, are often credited with reclaiming folk music’s role as a powerful social, cultural and political force.
The songs they sing invite the listener to participate, Yarrow told the Hall of Fame.
The listener, he said, “is central to finding a way of creating the life of the song at that listening. It’s the difference between poetry and didactic writing. One tells you, ‘This is it,’ and the other says, ‘Let’s find this together.’”
Wheeler said that music is one of the many ways Americans can share what’s on their minds – and that’s what Yarrow did as a singer, songwriter and artist.
“That’s what the civil rights movement meant to him,” Wheeler said. “He said to himself: ‘What can I do? I can stand with my friends. I can stand with my friends who are suffering. I can bear witness to their pain. And I can sing with them, for them, honoring them.’ And that is what he taught me about gun violence in regards to my son.”
A year after the shooting, Wheeler said it was too difficult to be part of the political conversation surrounding gun violence. But Yarrow told Wheeler there were other ways to get involved.
Yarrow told Wheeler: “Maybe you're not going to be standing there in Washington, but you can sing about your son. You can honor him and all those who have been killed by guns by saying, ‘That's not OK. It isn't OK to be suffering like this. We have to do something. Let me tell you what it feels like.’”
Wheeler said music is her way to share those feelings: “This is what it feels like to be a mother. This is what it feels like to deal with gun violence,” which is the leading cause of the death of children in the U.S.
Through the pain and the grief in the aftermath of the school shooting, through helping navigate her family through the years that followed, music helped guide her.
“I never stopped singing and that was one of the lessons that Peter taught me,” she said.
Wheeler said she had been in touch with Yarrow frequently over the past year. She knew he had been sick.
During his life, Peter Yarrow offered lessons for Wheeler and undoubtedly others. His death may offer one more lesson.
“His passing kind of represented a lot of the folk music of his time that needs to live on – and I hope does live on,” Wheeler said. “So in his death, I hope that we can honor him by still doing the work that he did.”
