About

Peter Mulvey’s sense of community and ethics

has moved him throughout his long career to use both his platform as a public person and his work itself to make positive change in the world. A jack of all trades by nature, his activism is diverse, widespread, and varied.

In response to the 2015 murders of the Charleston Nine at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, Peter wrote “Take Down Your Flag”, a simple three-verse song written in twenty minutes in the dressing room of the Calvin Theater in Northampton, MA, where he was about to open a show for Ani DiFranco. He sang it minutes later, and the next night Ani sang it with her band. Peter recorded a video of himself singing it, and then other artists began to cover it, each of them substituting their own middle verse for another of the victims of the massacre.

People began posting their own versions of the song with their own verses, and by the end of the summer, two hundred people had posted videos, including Ani, Anais Mitchell, Keb Mo, Jeff Daniels, Peter Yarrow, and a host of others. On online benefit concert and fundraiser performed by Peter and several other artists raised a few thousand dollars for the Lowcountry Ministries, and all the proceeds from the song have also been directed there.

Another area of focus for Mulvey is the environment. For fourteen years, he has booked a September tour traveling by bicycle instead of by airplane and car, riding hundreds of miles for a week or two of shows. He lets that speak for itself, in hopes of inspiring people to use alternative transport. During his most recent bicycle tour, from Wisconsin to Boston, he urged members of his audience to pick a day of the tour and donate to a cause in solidarity with his pedaling, and they responded with donations to land trusts, the ACLU, cancer research, children’s education, and Planned Parenthood, among others.

Much of Peter’s activism centers on using his presence and his art as a catalyst to provoke the inherent goodwill of his audience. In 2015, 2016, and 2017, he has performed a 12-hour concert, to a live and online audience, and used those concerts to raise money for a wide variety of non-profits, including No Kid Hungry, Public Allies, the National Youth Science Foundation, Raw Art Works, and many, many more.

On a related note, he released a free EP called “Lift Ev’ry Voice” which included “Take Down Your Flag”, “Song for Michael Brown”, and several other songs. He printed 3000 copies of the record, and set them out on the merchandise table at his gigs. The EPs were free, but printed on them was an agreement: the audience member was free to take the EP, but was agreeing to find a worthy cause and donate an amount of their choosing, either monetarily or by volunteering. In this way, spending only a few thousand dollars to print up the EPs, Mulvey was able to encourage his audience to donate considerably more money than that, and, best of all, time.

Mulvey has also had a long association with the National Youth Science Camp, having played a summer concert there for nineteen years, and helping to mentor brilliant young minds from all over the U.S. and beyond, and raising both awareness and money for the National Youth Science Foundation.