A Friendly Review

by Bill Schellstede

Bill Schellstede and his wife Sangmi have two grown daughters and live in Falls Church, VA. Bill is Senior Vice President of Family Health International, an organization funded by grants which are used to stem the tide of AIDS and deal with other health related issues on an international basis.

Bill and Peter were roommates at Harvard and have been close friends ever since then. They and their other roommates along with various family members have gathered for a Roommate Weekend each spring for the last 14 years.

Bill's "Friendly Review" derives from his unique perspective of having lived with Peter during his Club 47 days and having known him well for most of his life.

To go through The Peter Stanley Collection: A Lifetime of Music is to become, if only in a small way, a participant in the evolution of an historic period, a family and a man. Each of these in its own way can be heard in the music here, as its voice is found, its struggles defined and resolved, passing from something that was into something that will continue to become.

The most obvious of these, the Sixties, is vibrant here in celebration of its own exuberence, its angst and confusion, seeking yet a new voice for pain and joy felt througout time. Joan Baez sings and plays the way I want to remember her, trusting in the tradition she was aspiring to become part of, beginning to trust her own overwhelming talent, not yet a celebrity. Jim Kweskin entertains us thoroughly, combining serious protest with the infectious fun of good songs and good riffs. All rebelling against society in a way that borrowed from Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and Hudie Ledbetter, mixing it all up in a new recipe, and setting the tone for this generation and evidently the next, as well, in America and around the world: I've heard We Shall Overcome from anti-apartheid South Africans and from untouchables in India. The struggle continues.

The family is heard mainly from Christopher, Peter's oldest son. He and my older daughter are roughly the same age, speaking the same language that simultaneously doubts and loves. I've known Christopher, if only from a distance, for nearly thirty years, and to listen to his music now makes me see a baby, a boy, grown into a man. His guitar was fundamentally sound from an early age, but now it pulses with rhythms that startle me. His voice has matured, too, so that what seemed delicate in the younger man now is revealed in controlled and subtle variations on the melodies.


Peter Stanley, Bill Schellstede and David Seaton

Peter was a serious student of folk music from the earliest days of its revival. He took the courses at Harvard that celebrated the Scottish and English roots of the American tradition. At the same time, we were stringing up antenna wire in our rooms to pick up Wheeling, West Virginia, and Del Rio, Texas, so that we could follow that tradition as it was developing on the wider canvas of country music: "I heard the craish on the highwaayy, but I never heard nobody praayy..."

And the played the guitar. My Lord, how he played and practiced and learned new songs and played some more. I loved the music, too, and so he talked me into buying a banjo, and I played some. I hit my plateaus too quickly, finally not able to reach solid competence: I never could get my right hand to do much of anything that interested even me. But his enthusiasm for performing the music never flagged. And he had the talent that permitted his persistence to yield the marvelous fruit that we appreciate now.

And he searched out more music, even more music. He came back from 47 Mt. Auburn St. one night and summoned me to listen to the new stuff he'd recorded. We were listening to Joan Baez sing Plaisir d'Amour in that young, crystal-pure voice that could slice a miser's heart. Suddenly there was crashing and a roar and a rumble thundering out of the speaker. In answer to my questioning look, Peter meekly explained that she'd smiled at him, and he'd started rolling the microphone back and forth in his hands.

He showed up at my folk's home in Oklahoma one summer. Apart from learning something about life on the road ("Always wear a white shirt when you hitch-hike," he told me), he was after new songs. He already had a bunch on tape, and we listened to the hesitant, untutored voices reaching back into their past for tunes and words almost forgotten. I don't know how many of those songs he eventually used, if any of them, but they were a treasure to him, and I'm sure they still are.

And now we hold this enormous collection of music, A Lifetime of Music, for Heaven's sake, in our hands and we listen, and what are we to make of it? Well, first, it is, by God, awfully good music, indeed, some of it great. The spectrum is broad, from ballads to blues, from union songs and work songs to hymn and love laments. The guitar is uniformly rich, sometimes technically brilliant. And Peter's voice has long tempted envy in me. It is expressive and full and accurate.

But for me, a friend of some forty years, Peter's music means more than the pleasure of the music itself. It reflects an attitude of a man toward life, a philosophy, even, quite Eastern, really, that sees and accepts the world as it is: rich or poor, old or young, black or white, cop or crook, drop-out or honors graduate, human beings are endlessly fascinating, and many of their best stories are found in song. The music for him seeks out and caresses the beautiful, reveals and reviles the crass and the cowardly, and tickles itself nearly to death over the absurd. Finding the truth about the human condition demands imagination, rigor and intellectual honesty, and Peter's music is a wonderful place to start looking for it.