This Day in Music History (Mary Travers, Golden Center of ’60s Folk Hitmakers, Dies)

Sept. 16, 2009— Mary Travers, a willowy blonde whose soaring soprano and liberal-left politics helped lift the vocal trio Peter, Paul and Mary and a generation of folk music singer-songwriters onto the top of the charts and into the heart of the civil-rights and antiwar movements, died at age 72 in Danbury, CT, of side effects from chemotherapy for leukemia.

As I write this, Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris led Donald Trump first to speculate that the singer-songwriter might “pay a price for it…in the marketplace,” then to post, in all caps, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” on Truth Social. 

In a sense, Swift is the spiritual descendant of Travers—who, like fellow trio members Peter Yarrow and Noel (Paul) Stookey, was an outspoken social activist—and, unlike Swift, advocated relentlessly on multiple issues.

PPM’s 1963 cover version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” for instance, almost instantly became an anthem of the civil-rights movement, and brought his literate, serious songs to the attention of a public that at the time was buying softer pop fare like Lesley Gore’s “Judy’s Turn to Cry.”

This Kentucky native came to Greenwich Village as a child with her mother. A newspaper reporter and single parent, Virginia Travers had little time to spend with Mary, but left her with an important bit of advice—beware the thin line between compromise and complicity—and with an unexpected adult female role model: an African-American friend who often took Mary into her Harlem home on weekends, where the young girl developed an acute understanding of racial inequality.

Though in high school she joined the Song Swappers, which sang backup for Pete Seeger on several recordings, her initial diffidence about performing left her at loose ends on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1960s until Bob Dylan's aggressive manager Albert Grossman decided to manufacture his own counterpart to the all-male Kingston Trio—only with the svelte Travers to provide sex appeal in combination with the goateed Yarrow and Stookey.

Grossman had particular instructions for Travers. Perhaps to increase her mystique, she was to leave the speaking onstage to Yarrow and Stookey (a request she agreed to, given her stage fright at the time). More oddly, according to a December 2020 episode of the podcast "500 Songs" by Andrew Hickey, Grossman also insisted that Travers stay inside, lest any tan that resulted spoiled her image.

Yarrow and Stookey composed only a handful of songs themselves (“Puff the Magic Dragon” and “I Dig Rock ‘n’ Roll Music”) and they exhibited serviceable rather than virtuoso guitar skills. But, after considerable refinement by arranger and producer Milt Okun, they learned how to blend their harmonies effortlessly with Travis.

Moreover, they proved excellent interpreters of works by others, as they exposed listeners not only to Dylan but also to the likes of Gordon Lightfoot (“Early Morning Rain”), Laura Nyro (“And When I Die”), Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs and John Denver (“Leaving on a Jet Plane”).

Commercial success and high cultural visibility followed. Twelve hit singles came in the nine years after their formation in 1961, and the three singers appeared at the 1963 March on Washington, at the White House for the celebration of John F. Kennedy's second year in office, and at Martin Luther King's 1965 march on Selma.

The group broke up in 1970, not because of the clashes over ego, money, and creative direction that bedevil so many other musical combos, but simply because Stookey feared a heavy touring schedule would jeopardize his family life.

Travers used the next several years away from her musical partners to good effect—writing poetry, hosting her own radio show (even landing the first interview that Dylan had given in over a decade), and, by necessity, taking greater command in her solo concerts than she had done with Yarrow and Stookey.

The three singers stayed on good terms after they ceased working together in 1970, so no tensions had to be eased over when they reunited eight years later for a no-nukes benefit concert.

An album, titled, appropriately enough, Reunion, followed, and though its pop arrangements reportedly disappointed Yarrow by departing from their more folk-oriented sound, it provided a pretext for touring and reconnecting with their audience.

When I saw them in an August 1978 concert at Central Park, they were received rapturously by fans.

Peter, Paul and Mary continued to perform together, albeit less frequently, until a few months before Travers' death. But they were aware that they were fighting rather than in sync with the national zeitgeist, as they contrasted the "Us Decade" of the 1960s with the "Me Decade" of the Jimmy Carter years.

Moreover, from the 1980s on, they were often condescendingly regarded as relics of a bygone era, even the model for "The Folksmen" for the film mockumentary "A Mighty Wind," according to this January 2015 blog post by Glen Herbert. 

All of this was beside the point, as far as their musical legacy was concerned. Was the trio's sometimes-derided earnestness really any worse than other musical artists' snarkiness? 

In any case, the group still enjoyed playing for appreciative audiences, and their harmonies remained largely undimmed by the inevitable aging process. Travers herself was now more ready to challenge convention, whether in public, on US policy towards Central America in the Reagan years, or even privately with Yarrow and Stookey. 

Even in these later years, she was influencing a later generation of folksingers, according to singer-songwriter Nerissa Nields in a blog post appropriately titled "Thank You, Mary" right after Travers' death:

"The Mary we all saw in the sixties was much more complicated and interesting than the blond, leggy, silent-except-when-belting-her heart-out Greenwich Village waif we mostly got to see.... By the time [sister] Katryna and I got to watch her perform in person in the mid-80s, she was silent no longer. Au contraire: she was full of opinions. She was also significantly overweight, a fact she joked about from the stage. She was breaking all the rules, tossing out all the adjectives assigned to her. And through that singular revolution, she liberated two future folk singers." 

Now in their eighties, Yarrow and Stookey continue to perform together, but I am sure they would acknowledge that something is inevitably missing without their longtime female partner. Those yearning for that missing element can find a Peter, Paul and Mary tribute band on YouTube. But nothing compares to the charismatic blonde with the ringing alto that touched the heart.