Peter Yarrow '59 celebrated his 50th Cornell reunion June 5 by leading a circle of folk musicians in songs -- from "Down by the Riverside" to "Blowin' in the Wind" -- and remembrances of a 1950s folklore course that have shaped his life and career as a professional musician.

More than 900 people sang along to folk favorites in Bailey Hall during the 90-minute program, "Romping-n-Stomping: A Revival," presented by the Class of 1959.

The "revival" was that of a staple of 1950s student life at Cornell, Professor Harold Thompson's American Folk Literature course, colloquially known as "Romp-n-Stomp."

The singer was the last student instructor in the popular course, which ended when Thompson retired in 1959. Within a year, Yarrow would be preparing for his debut with Mary Travers and Noel Paul Stookey as Peter, Paul and Mary -- originally dubbed "The Ivy League Three."

Cornell was "a place where I felt comfortable," recalled Yarrow. "They had a folk song club, and then I got a job teaching in this course. It paid $500 a year, at that time about 20 percent of what a year at Cornell cost; and I got to park my $50 car on campus."

For an hour three times a week, Thompson would lecture for half the time, then Yarrow or another student musician would lead the class in songs about topics Thompson had just discussed. They sang traditional murder ballads -- very popular with the athletes and other students in the course -- along with Dust Bowl ballads and songs of freedom and slavery that spoke to the pressing issues of the civil rights era.

"If you take what I learned in Romp-n-Stomp and look at Peter, Paul and Mary in the march on Washington in 1963, singing 'Blowin' in the Wind' and 'If I Had a Hammer,' it was just an extrapolation from Romp-n-Stomp,'" Yarrow said.

He was joined onstage by Ellen Stekert '57, a student instructor in the course from 1955-57, who also made a career as a musician; Joel Hendler '58 (playing his banjo again after more than 40 years), Stan Lomax '59 (a cousin to ethnomusicologists Alan and John Lomax, which he said pleased Thompson), Harry Petchesky '59 and professor of history Richard Polenberg, whose writing seminars on The Blues and American Culture carry on some of Thompson's legacy for contemporary Cornell students.

With Yarrow and Stekert on guitar and Polenberg and Hendler on banjo, all participants sang harmony, while urging the audience to sing along. Hendler subverted a hippie-era put-down by leading a sing-along of "Kumbaya."

This was also Yarrow's first time attending a Cornell reunion; he said he is busy with his nonprofit organization, Operation Respect, geared to giving schoolchildren a safe, compassionate environment in which to learn.

Lomax recalled many of the professors he considers giants -- including Thompson, Robert Beck, Milton Konvitz, Clinton Rossiter and A. Henry Detweiler -- and said he wanted to petition the College of Arts and Sciences to add more courses in the study of folk music.

Yarrow closed the program with: "Blowin' in the Wind," "Don't Laugh at Me" and a medley of "This Little Light of Mine," "Down By the Riverside" (with an added line, "Close down Guantanamo") and "This Land is Your Land."