I called Maine from Missouri, very long distance, with a modem in order to talk about the weather on Noel Paul Stookey's Celebration Station BBS. (Noel, the Paul in Peter Paul and Mary, has had an Electronic Bulletin Board System long before the Internet became a phenomenon. I used to BBS a lot, before I got Internet access, but mostly locally...) My collection grew to include nearly every piece of sound any one of the three ever recorded. If I came within range of a library I would look up PP&M in the index of every music book that looked promising, and copy down whatever gems of wisdom appeared therein. I searched microfilm catalogs for old articles or reviews about them. To date I have been to four concerts, at two of which I got to go backstage after the show (they are very nice in person). By hand, I copied the lyrics to nearly all their songs into a scrapbook, in alphabetical order, indexed according to which recording(s) it was on.
It is from Peter, Paul and Mary that most of my exposure to and love for other folky music sprung. I first picked up Joan Baez's autobiography And A Voice To Sing With (see my Joan Baez page) because I wanted to see if there was anything about Peter Paul and Mary in it. I bought my first Christine Lavin CD (Buy Me Bring Me Take Me Don't Mess My Hair: Life According To Four Bitchin Babes, Volume 1) because I heard Mary was singing Sally Fingerett's song "Home Is Where The Heart Is" in concerts, and that song was on the CD. And once you get a Bitchin Babes CD you find yourself buying anything related to Christine Lavin, and once you do THAT you get the compilations she's made and you learn allll about the singer-songwriter scene that's flourishing today...It's a beautiful, song-filled, ever-widening tree of interests, all thanks to PP&M.
And I still love PP&M! Perhaps I'm not as rabid a fan as I once was.
Perhaps if you gave me a PP&M trivia question, it's possible that I might
not know the answer right away. But their harmonies can't be beat! I love
the songs they sing! They are masters of their craft. I only wish Mary
would learn to play an instrument, because whenever I watch my tapes of
the PBS specials, I want her to have something to do with her hands.
This website has all sorts of information, including lyrics, some of which I contributed by typing them in from the aforementioned scrapbook. And The Celebration Station has taken to the web! Noel Stookey is about as cyber as a folkie can get!
You can also garner info from online record store CDNow, but it's probably better to support your local, non-chain-owned record store with your purchases!