Word: pp
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...singles were the thriving format back then, and that's where PP&M shone. They scored six Top 10 hits and placed seven others in the top 40. Travers' strong lead on "Lemon Tree," a Brazilian folk song for which Will Holt had written new lyrics, gave them their first hit. It was followed by Seeger and Lee Hays' "If I Had a Hammer." The group changed the phrase "all my brothers" to the more ecumenical "my brothers and my sisters" and helped make the number an anthem for the decade's civil-rights movement. Their rendition was a highlight...
Inevitably, one Grossman act inspired the other: PP&M recorded "Blowin' in the Wind," the first Bob Dylan song to become a hit, and lent a mellow rue to his "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," thus spurring a small industry of Dylan covers and easing the singer-songwriter's emergence as his own wiliest interpreter. They had hits with new compositions (John Denver's "Leaving on a Jet Plane") and reworked folk tunes (Hedy West's take on "500 Miles"). Other groups had recorded these songs, but PP&M sold them best, with artfully simple musical settings...
Like many folk groups, they found their material by scouring old songbooks and listening attentively to obscure albums on the Folkways and Vanguard labels. One Vanguard trio, the Greenbriar Boys, expressed resentment when PP&M used their arrangement of the English ballad "Stewball" for yet another hit single. But Seeger said he was pleased by PP&M's version of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," which he had adapted from a Cossack lyric (and to which folk singer Joe Hickerson added the final verses). Voilà! One more antiwar ballad to insinuate its thesis into the minds...
...their scrupulous borrowings, PP&M's most memorable hit came from within the group. When Yarrow was at Cornell, a fellow undergraduate, future indie filmmaker Lenny Lipton, had written a poem in the spirit of Ogden Nash; Yarrow set it to music, and a few years later the trio recorded "Puff the Magic Dragon." This children's song, with its fanciful friendship and lilting chorus, would dominate the Top 40 and be sung in summer camp forever after. To the cognoscenti, this was a drug song in pop-music code: Puff, drag-on, "little Jackie Paper." Hipsters began referring...
...could argue that crispación did have a lasting impact in one arena: the question of ETA. When the group announced a permanent ceasefire in 2006, the PP initially, if tepidly, agreed to support the government's investigation into whether the separatists truly intended to abandon violence. But when the government began tentative talks with the group, the PP reverted to its rhetorical attacks, repeatedly accusing the government of "betrayal" and "negotiating with terrorists" and at one point, refusing for the first time in history to participate in a government-sponsored anti-ETA march. (Read a TIME story about...