The Archivist Arrival

Just the Beginning

There was a perfect storm at the Stookey house last week! Just back from some joyous and confirming musical sessions with my Convergence Project peers in Nashville, I spent Monday down in the basement of our house here in Maine, trying my best to organize over sixty years of clippings, photos, letters, itineraries, contracts, schedules, video and audio cassettes for an impending visit by a professional archivist.

Upon arrival, the archivist was all about identifying those items which should be part of what ultimately will be a museum-bound Peter, Paul and Mary Collection. (NOTE: The Martin guitar that I played those first years at the Gaslight and on the road with the trio is already on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. And Sebastian, the 12 string guitar which accompanied me on the “Wedding Song,” has been donated to the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix.)

Fortunately, I had a bit of a head-start in my preparation for the archivist’s arrival by having done similar investigations these past seven years with Jeanne Finley for our forthcoming book For the Love of it All. My childhood has been thoroughly examined, my high-school rock and roll years “exposed,” and early Greenwich Village friendships and performances—post and pre-PP&M—recalled and rendered into text.

The curious thing about sorting through physical items of one's past is that they seem to lead quite naturally to reviving related memories about the years in which these objects were constant companions. They remind me of the fact that many times my songwriting has been self-reflective of my life. Songs like “Hymn” and “Father's House” are part of an arc of experience which I am now recognizing as part of a longer spiritual path.

“Father’s House” was one of the songs I sang in Nashville the week before the archivist arrived. Singing with and for the Convergence Music Project folks was much more than a performance for me. It was a reawakening of sorts as I had the opportunity to hear the warm, inclusive and insightful keynote welcome by Brian McLaren, to hear a stirring call by Otis Moss III to “remix” this troubled world with Love, and to listen Diana Butler Bass as she told the story of how the scholarship of Dr. Libbie Schrader is reframing the importance of Mary Magdalene in the New Testament narrative and church history. And the music—particularly the improvisational magic of Ken Medema—was a continual and confirming witness to the Spirit that surrounded us all during the conference. 

NPS

Connections

One of the featured speakers at Converging 2023 was the Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. In this 7-minute WTTW interview about his book Dancing in the Darkness: Spiritual Lessons for Turbulent Times, Dr. Moss talks about the connection between justice and love. He spoke with such energy and speed that neither Noel nor I were able to take notes, but I remember hearing this poetic sentence which I found in this article about a very similar lecture/sermon that he delivered last summer at the historic Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York:

“If we are to be poets of the movement, stewards of agitation, griots of the sacred stories, cantors of resistance and preachers of a freedom faith, (then) we are all called to be poetic DJs and create a mixtape that America desperately needs in this moment.” 

JTF

Vibrations   

Noel wrote “Father’s House” in 1990 when he was 52. His spiritual journey didn’t end then. If you listen carefully to his songs written after 1990 (and he’s still writing), you know that he kept on growing and maturing spiritually. At Converging 2023, the progressive Christian music conference we attended in mid-October, he opened his concert with “Father’s House,” and when he finished singing, he talked about how he has grown in his awareness of the need for inclusive language for God.

JTF

Resonance

Having posted some of my songs on The Cottage (Diana Butler Bass’s Substack), I was looking forward to hearing her speak at the recent CMP. Jeanne and I were blown away by her telling of the Libbie Schrader story. Like most clergywomen and women who are scholars of religion, Jeanne has lived with the invisibility of women that the church has promulgated for centuries, in large part—according to Schrader’s research—because of an alteration made to Papyrus 66, the oldest and most complete text of the Gospel of John, which created a false and misleading narrative that diminished Mary Magdalene’s role in the history of the Christian church. 

In my concert introduction to “The Wedding Song,” I regularly confess that the original prayed-for lyric was, “I am now to be among you at the calling of your hearts. Rest assured this troubadour is acting on My part . . . ” and that my altering the lyric to “He” and “His” to accommodate the prevailing sensibilities of the 1970s was, in it’s own way, a similar continuation of the patriarchal influence.  Offered as a contemporary apology on stage, I make the suggestion that there should be a bumper sticker that says “In matters of theology, it’s wise that we remember: In Christ there is no East or West, in God there is no gender.”

To discover that the song has been such a touch-stone to both Diana and Brian was one of the lovely gifts I have taken away from the Converging Music Project event. As Diana said recently on her Cottage podcast (this one to her paid subscribers), “It was almost as if every part of my entire life just sort of unfolded in the melody, in the words of that song [“The Wedding Song”]. It was so deeply, profoundly part of my own soul.” She summed up my appearance at the event saying,

“He played a lot of other music that I know that all of you love and … [which] shaped really important parts of your own spiritual journey or your life . . . . There are songs that he's got now over on his website about environmentalism and other issues of justice. . . and he's gone on this remarkable, I think, theological and spiritual journey that so many of you have, finding his way first in evangelical Christianity. That’s where I first heard him in concert at an evangelical college Christian concert when I was 19 years old. And he has moved in a direction where he definitely considers himself a progressive Christian, and he is passionate about so many of the issues that we care about too.”

Thank you, Diana . . . for your resonance (physics definition: the synchronous vibration of a neighboring object).  

NPS

A Final Note

Since I’m posting Noel’s essay, I have an addition to make. I hope he doesn’t compare me to that meddling “editor” of the oldest text of the Gospel of John. Just kidding. He’ll see this before it goes public. […and i have]

The research that Libbie Schrader has done in the oldest text of the Gospel of John is a complicated story. You can read more about it in the transcript of Diana Butler Bass’s sermon, “Mary the Tower.” Here’s a video of that sermon, “All the Marys,” which Diana preached at the closing of the 2022 Wild Goose Festival. In it she includes an account of Libbie Schrader’s remarkable research.

This post is a window into our creative process in Strings and in our forthcoming book. Each of us is an archivist, a collector of pieces of his and her very different lives. We record our video conversations and transcribe them. I write, and he edits me. He writes, and I edit him. We go back and forth. We both have worked in collaboration with others, and we bring that experience to our collaboration. You don’t have to consider yourself an artist to be an archivist who collects and creates, and bringing your “archives” into a collaborative project extends its potential benefit.

JTF