Mary Travers; Guardian obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Singer with the 1960s hit-making American folk revival trio
Peter, Paul and Mary
Dave Laing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/sep/17/mary-travers-obituary
Peter, Paul and Mary were the most successful vocal group of
the American folk revival of the 1960s. In particular, they
were responsible for bringing the music of Bob Dylan to a
mass audience through their hit record of his Blowin' in the
Wind. With her powerful voice and long blonde hair, Mary
Travers, who has died aged 72, was the focal point of the
trio.
She was born in Louisville, Kentucky, but her journalist
parents moved to Greenwich Village, New York, when she was
two years old. She attended progressive private schools and
recalled that folk music was "a very integral part of the
liberal left experience. It was writers, sculptors,
painters, whatever, listening to Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger,
the Weavers. People sang in Washington Square park on
Sundays and you really did not have to have a lot of talent
to sing folk music." At high school, she was a member of the
Song Swappers, an ad hoc chorus that accompanied Seeger on
several recordings. After graduation, Travers had no
ambition to perform, although she occasionally sang in folk
clubs and appeared in the comedian Mort Sahl's Broadway show
The Next President, in 1958.
The group was formed in 1960 by the folk impresario Albert
Grossman, who saw a commercial opportunity for a male and
female trio to emulate the success of the all-male Kingston
Trio. He already managed Peter Yarrow and Travers brought in
Noel Stookey, a stand-up comedian and singer, who adopted
his middle name, Paul, for the purposes of the new group.
Travers once said that the name was also inspired by the
folk-song lyric "I saw Peter, Paul and Moses, playing ring
around the roses".
Grossman hired the arranger and producer Milt Okun to
rehearse the trio. He smoothed out their harmonies and
trained their individual voices. "I had a tendency to
sometimes go flat and Milt fixed it," said Travers. Six
months later, in 1961, Peter, Paul and Mary made their
professional debut at the Bitter End coffee house, Greenwich
Village. Yarrow explained that Grossman's plan was for
Travers to be a kind of American Brigitte Bardot, a "sex
object for the college male", maintaining her mystique by
not talking to audiences.
A recording contract with Warner Bros soon followed,
although the company's executives were nervous about the
"beatnik" image projected by Travers's long hair and casual
clothes and the men's goatee beards. Peter, Paul and Mary's
contract gave them an advance of $30,000 and control over
album cover art. The first, eponymous album was issued in
1962. It soon rose to No 1 in the US and sold more than 2m
copies there. The album also produced two hit singles with
the traditional song Lemon Tree and If I Had a Hammer - a
spiritual associated with Seeger. Puff, the Magic Dragon, a
children's song co-written by Yarrow which was sometimes
claimed to contain coded drug references, was another big
early hit.
By 1963 Grossman was also managing Dylan, and Peter, Paul
and Mary recorded several of his songs, replacing the
composer's idiosyncratic diction with their punchy but
conventional harmonies. In the summer of that year, the trio
had massive hits with Blowin' in the Wind, which also made
the UK Top 20, and Don't Think Twice, It's All Right. In
that year, too, the group were headliners at the Newport
folk festival, where they sang Blowin' in the Wind alongside
Dylan, Seeger and Joan Baez.
Peter, Paul and Mary were strongly committed to civil
rights. Travers often said that Blowin' in the Wind was her
favourite song and that her most important performance was
in Washington at the climax of Martin Luther King's march on
Washington. "Imagine singing that song in front of a quarter
of a million people, black and white, who believed they
could make America more generous and compassionate in a
non-violent way."
The group's success also led to an invitation to sing at the
official celebration of president John F Kennedy's second
year in office. Travers had to buy a long dress and long
gloves for the occasion.
Although acoustic music and the folk revival was eclipsed in
the mid-1960s by rock and folk-rock, Peter, Paul and Mary
remained popular throughout the decade. They recorded hit
singles with a song by the rising Canadian star Gordon
Lightfoot, For Lovin' Me, the tongue-in-cheek I Dig Rock and
Roll Music, part-written by Stookey, and another Dylan
piece, When the Ship Comes In. Their final hit, and their
only US No 1 single, was the John Denver composition Leaving
on a Jet Plane, in 1969. It was also their biggest UK hit,
reaching No 2 in 1970.
When the group split up that year, Travers continued as a
soloist. She recorded five albums in the 1970s, though none
emulated the trio's success. She also hosted an
interview-based radio show for several years. The trio
eventually reunited in 1978 to play a benefit concert for
anti-nuclear causes. They toured and recorded occasionally
over the next two decades. The title song of their 1986
album, No Easy Walk to Freedom, was dedicated to Nelson
Mandela. In that year, Peter, Paul and Mary performed at the
Martin Luther King birthday celebrations in Washington,
reprising Blowin' in the Wind with Dylan.
In 2005, Travers was diagnosed with leukaemia and underwent
bone marrow transplant surgery. She was able to return to
performing, but earlier this year her condition worsened.
She is survived by her fourth husband, Ethan Robbins, two
daughters, Alicia and Erika, from a previous marriage, and
two grandchildren.
. Mary Allin Travers, singer, born 9 November 1936; died 16
September 2009