Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Hippies?

Mary Travers, of Peter, Paul and Mary, died September 16th (of leukemia). When they announced her passing on Yahoo, they ran this photo.



Yes, that is Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder performing with Peter, Paul and Mary! The photo is from a concert in the 1980's.

I have been a Peter, Paul and Mary fan for as long as I can remember, so I decided to download the photo and put it on my computer desktop for a few days. That's when I discovered that the name of the JPEG file containing it was hippies.jpg . I was shocked!

I believe that all five of these folks predate the hippie movement. Stevie Wonder got his first national exposure in the "beach party" movies of the early '60's. Peter, Paul and Mary were folk singers; I'm not sure their early hits were even considered Rock-and-Roll at the time. And Bob Dylan certainly got his start in folk music before crossing over to Rock. He notably caused a stir the first time he put down his acoustic guitar and picked up an electric one.

So, where do they get off calling these people hippies? What do you think?