http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/26/nyregion/everyone-knows-peter-paul-and-mary-but-what-about-the-other-guy.html 2016-09-25 18:33:18 Everyone Knows Peter, Paul and Mary. But What About the Other Guy? Robert De Cormier was the recording secretary for the folk act, in charge of arranging music and mediating disputes. He will be celebrated at Symphony Space. === The world is full of who-knew jobs, jobs you did not know were jobs until you found out that somebody did them. Who knew that That was the title suggested by Noel Paul Stookey — Paul to the world. The man who had the job wrote down the vocal lines that Mr. Stookey and Peter Yarrow and Mary Travers improvised in rehearsal so they would remember them. And no, Mr. Stookey did not have a pun in mind, suggesting “recording secretary” as a title for someone who listened in at, um, recording sessions, sometimes telling the engineer to squelch this note or boost that one. The man in question was Robert De Cormier, 94, who served as their music director for 17 years — arranging, conducting and, when things became heated in rehearsals, doubling as diplomat and mediator. Mr. Yarrow had a different description of Mr. De Cormier’s job: fourth member of He will be celebrated at a concert on Thursday at “He lived the same imperative that Peter, Paul and Mary did,” Mr. Yarrow said, “thinking of this music not just as an art form that had beauty, and that’s admirable in and of itself, but also as a vehicle for spreading a certain kind of sensibility.” “We’re not just talking about pretty music,” Mr. Yarrow said. “We’re talking about conveying a sense of commitment and urgency.” Mr. De Cormier did not sing at their concerts or go on tour with them. But he did not go unseen. On holiday concerts that aired on PBS, the cameras showed him in the orchestra pit, from a distance — little more, one year, than the back of his head, his arms raised, his baton in his hand. Another year, the camera caught him from the front for a few seconds during the “Hallelujah” chorus. For that piece, Mr. Yarrow, Mr. Stookey and Ms. Travers stood in with the New York Choral Society, which Mr. De Cormier directed from 1970 to 1987. He led a musical double life, as a choral director and a composer in classical music and as an arranger and a conductor in folk and pop. Mr. Yarrow, Mr. Stookey and Ms. Travers had tried to hire Mr. De Cormier when they were starting out, in 1960. “Bob was our first choice,” Mr. Stookey said, “and we didn’t get him.” He was busy working with Harry Belafonte and the Belafonte Folk Singers. Mr. De Cormier, who grew up in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., had taken up the trumpet when he was 7. He kept at it, playing in a dance band during the two years he spent at Colby College in Waterville, Me., and studying music at the University of New Mexico until he joined the Army in World War II. Any thought of playing in an Army band ended when he was assigned to the infantry and sent to Europe. Any thought of a career as a trumpeter ended when he was hit by a mortar shell that all but destroyed his wrist. He was eventually sent to recuperate in a hospital on Staten Island, where he read about a chorus being formed in Manhattan for the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a union that later merged with the American Federation of Labor. He auditioned, and at one rehearsal, met the Mr. De Cormier considered becoming a union organizer but decided on music, entering the Juilliard School of Music. Along the way, he met performers such as Huddie Ledbetter, the folk and blues musician It was a way of protecting Mr. Belafonte, he explained last week. “McCarthy was responsible for the name change,” Mr. De Cormier said, referring to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. “I told Harry I didn’t want to jeopardize him in any way. I was on many lists.” He said he had joined the Communist Party when he was younger and had worked at Camp Unity in Wingdale, N.Y., in Dutchess County. “The Encyclopedia of the American Left” mentioned Camp Unity in connection with “Cold War harassment — including a 1955 investigation to uncover ‘Communists’ use of summer camps to indoctrinate and disaffect American youth.” Mr. Yarrow recalled that the United States was just coming out of the blacklist period in the late 1950s. “You were trying not to be pursued by Joe McCarthy and his legacy,” Mr. Yarrow said. “The shadow of being tainted in that way, it was like ‘Puff the Magic Dragon.’ I can’t get rid of the rumor that it was about drugs, which it never was at all. You’re stuck with that kind of label.” Peter, Paul and Mary knew of Mr. De Cormier because of Ms. Travers, who Mr. De Cormier said he did not expect her to become famous in music. He had students who he figured would have music careers, he said, but “Mary was kind of a surprise.” “She was a terrible student,” he said. “She had a hard time in school, except with me.” Once Mr. De Cormier signed on with Peter, Paul and Mary in the 1970s, he functioned as a listener, editor and secretary. “They would improvise a lot, and where we got something we all liked, I would write it down, because if I didn’t, the next day, it was start all over again.” Mr. Yarrow said Mr. De Cormier was important because “none of us was musically articulate enough to write it down. “I could do it laboriously, but he was a whiz,” Mr. Yarrow said. “He could hear everything at the same time. You could feel his point of view, and that helped us to find our identity, but he did not attempt to say, ‘O.K., here’s the arrangement, this is it.’ He knew the most authentic way was for us to do it in person, singing the parts to each other.”