02/08/2026
What is/was your wedding song?
He wrote it in an hour. He never kept a single dollar it earned. And it became the most cherished wedding song in America.
In the fall of 1969, Paul Stookey received a phone call that would quietly reshape his life. His friend and bandmate Peter Yarrow was getting married. Peter, one third of Peter, Paul and Mary, asked a simple favor. Would Paul write a song and sing it at the ceremony?
Paul agreed without hesitation.
Privately, though, he felt something unusual. This was not a song he could simply sit down and craft. It needed something beyond him.
Not long before the wedding, Stookey went into the small basement studio of his home in Connecticut. He picked up his twelve string guitar, sat in the stillness, and prayed.
“Lord,” he said, “nothing would bless this wedding more than Your presence. How would You show Yourself?”
Then he picked up a pencil.
For the next hour, the words arrived effortlessly. Not slowly. Not with strain. They came as if they had already existed. Stookey later said it felt less like writing and more like taking dictation. His hand moved, and he simply allowed it.
The first line he wrote was, “I am now to be among you at the calling of your hearts.”
An hour before the ceremony, he sang it for his wife Betty. She loved it, but she noticed something important. “They won’t understand ‘I am now to be among you,’” she said. “They’ll think you’re claiming to be God.”
She was right. Paul changed one word.
“He is now to be among you at the calling of your hearts. Rest assured this troubadour is acting on His part.”
On the evening of October 18, 1969, at Saint Mary’s Catholic Church in Willmar, Minnesota, Paul Stookey stood as best man and sang the song for the first time. It was meant to be a private gift. A blessing shared among friends. He assumed it would never be heard again.
A few weeks later, backstage before a concert, Peter made a quiet request. His wife was in the audience. Would Paul sing it for her?
Paul stepped to the microphone. The room fell silent. There was something in the melody, gentle and unforced, that reached people in a way no one anticipated.
He sang it again. And again. People began asking for it.
When Peter, Paul and Mary took a break from touring in 1970, Stookey recorded the song for his first solo album, Paul and…. Released in 1971, “Wedding Song (There Is Love)” climbed into the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number 24. On the Easy Listening chart, it reached number 3.
That was when Paul faced a dilemma.
He did not believe the song belonged to him. He felt it had been given, not created. Claiming it for himself did not feel right. But refusing ownership entirely would simply hand the royalties to the record company.
So he chose another way.
He created the Public Domain Foundation, a charitable trust that would receive every songwriting royalty the piece would ever generate. Paul kept none of it.
When the record label called with exciting news that The Tonight Show wanted him to perform the song on national television, promising it could launch his solo career, Paul declined.
“No, thank you,” he said.
Over the years, the Public Domain Foundation has distributed millions of dollars to charities across the country. Soup kitchens. Children’s programs. Hospitals. Music education. Causes whose outcomes Paul would never witness. The figure reported in the 1990s was already over two million dollars, and it has continued to grow.
The song has been recorded by artists like Petula Clark, Captain and Tennille, Mary MacGregor, Nana Mouskouri, and many others. It has been sung at weddings around the world for more than half a century. Guitarists learn it. Couples request it. For countless families, it marks the beginning of a life together.
And Paul Stookey has never taken a cent from it.
Each year, he turns down invitations to perform the song at weddings. His explanation never changes.
“It’s not my song,” he says. “It belongs to every couple whose friend strums a guitar and sings at their wedding. God gave me a song. It was mine to give away.”
Asked how he explains where it came from, Stookey keeps it simple.
“Into every songwriter’s life comes a song whose source cannot be explained by personal experience.”
He wrote it in one hour in a basement in Connecticut. He sang it once for two friends he loved. He gave away everything it earned.
More than fifty years later, that single hour is still blessing strangers on the most important day of their lives.
Some songs are written. Some are given.
What matters is what you do with them afterward.
