I saw this last night when I came home from class. (I'm studying environmental science at College of Marin this semester)

now even if you thought "Leaving on a Jet Plane" was schlock and ", I'll bet you grew up singing Puff the Magic Dragon and hearing PP and M doing "Blowin' in the Wind" and :"Turn Turn Turn" and :If I Had a Hammer" and diggin' it. oh and other kids dsongs, remember "it went whrr when it ran and buss when it stopped and buss when it stood still?" and "Sing tarry-o-day, sing autumn to may" and :If you take my hand my son, wall will be well when the day is doen.."

I went to a liberal Jewish summer camp, Camp JCA at Barton Flats and I swear we sang everything Peter Pal and Mary ever recorded.

I saw and heard them at the Hollywood Bowl a few times growing up, including the Tribute to Woody Guthrie not that long after his death.
someone, I think in the comments for Rolling Stone on line, said, "Puff that mighty dragon sadly crept into his cave" about Ma;s death.


The NY Times obit is about the most detailed (and even ironic) I've seen, makes
sense partly in that Mary was raised in Greenwich Village herself...funny how
provincial the Big Apple and its world-class newspaper can be.

anyway, she, and PPM, were influential on all of us, musicians and listeners,
even if sometimes the sound was a bit commercial compared to some other
performers of the time...interesting note by the NYT hat the folk revival pretty
much ended with the Beatles and subsequent "British invasion."

eptember 17, 2009
Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary Dies at 72
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Mary Travers, whose ringing, earnest vocals with the folk trio Peter, Paul and
Mary made songs like "Blowin' in the Wind," "If I Had a Hammer" and "Where Have
All the Flowers Gone?" enduring anthems of the 1960s protest movement, died on
Wednesday at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut. She was 72 and lived in Redding,
Conn.

The cause was complications from chemotherapy associated with a bone-marrow
transplant she had several years ago after developing leukemia, said Heather
Lylis, a spokeswoman.

Ms. Travers brought a powerful voice and an unfeigned urgency to music that
resonated with mainstream listeners. With her straight blond hair and willowy
figure and two bearded guitar players by her side, she looked exactly like what
she was, a Greenwich Villager directly from the clubs and the coffeehouses that
nourished the folk-music revival.

"She was obviously the sex appeal of that group, and that group was the sex
appeal of the movement," said Elijah Wald, a folk-blues musician and a historian
of popular music.

Ms. Travers's voice blended seamlessly with those of her colleagues, Peter
Yarrow and Paul Stookey, to create a rich three-part harmony that propelled the
group to the top of the pop charts. Their first album, "Peter, Paul and Mary,"
which featured the hit singles "Lemon Tree" and "If I Had a Hammer," reached No.
1 shortly after its release in March 1962 and stayed there for seven weeks,
eventually selling more than two million copies.

The group's interpretations of Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Don't
Think Twice, It's All Right" translated his raw vocal style into a smooth, more
commercially acceptable sound. The singers also scored big hits with pleasing
songs like the whimsical "Puff the Magic Dragon" and John Denver's plaintive
"Leaving on a Jet Plane."

Their sound may have been commercial and safe, but early on their politics were
somewhat risky for a group courting a mass audience. Like Mr. Yarrow and Mr.
Stookey, Ms. Travers was outspoken in her support for the civil-rights and
antiwar movements, in sharp contrast to clean-cut folk groups like the Kingston
Trio, which avoided making political statements.

Peter, Paul and Mary went on to perform at the 1963 March on Washington and
joined the voting-rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965.

Over the years they performed frequently at political rallies and demonstrations
in the United States and abroad. After the group disbanded, in 1970, Ms. Travers
continued to perform at political events around the world as she pursued a solo
career.

"They made folk music not just palatable but accessible to a mass audience,"
David Hajdu, the author of "Positively Fourth Street," a book about Mr. Dylan,
Joan Baez and their circle, said in an interview. Ms. Travers, he added, was
crucial to the group's image, which had a lot to do with its appeal. "She had a
kind of sexual confidence combined with intelligence, edginess and social
consciousness — a potent combination," he said. "If you look at clips of their
performances, the camera fixates on her. The act was all about Mary."

Mr. Yarrow, in a statement on Wednesday, described Ms. Travers's singing style
as an expression of her character: "honest and completely authentic."

Mr. Stookey, in an accompanying statement, wrote that "her charisma was a barely
contained nervous energy — occasionally (and then only privately) revealed as
stage fright."

Mary Allin Travers was born on Nov. 9, 1936, in Louisville, Ky. When she was 2
her parents, both writers, moved to New York. Almost unique among the folk
musicians who emerged from the Greenwich Village scene in the early 1960s, Ms.
Travers actually came from the neighborhood. She attended progressive private
schools there, studied singing with the music teacher Charity Bailey while still
in kindergarten and became part of the folk-music revival as it took shape
around her.

"I was raised on Josh White, the Weavers and Pete Seeger," Ms. Travers told The
New York Times in 1994. "The music was everywhere. You'd go to a party at
somebody's apartment and there would be 50 people there, singing well into the
night."

While at Elisabeth Irwin High School, she joined the Song Swappers, which sang
backup for Mr. Seeger when the Folkways label reissued a collection of union
songs under the title "Talking Union" in 1955. The Song Swappers made three more
albums for Folkways that year, all featuring Mr. Seeger to some degree.

Ms. Travers had no plans to sing professionally. Folk singing, she later said,
had been a hobby. At New York clubs friends like Fred Hellerman of the Weavers
and Theodore Bikel would coax her onstage to sing, but her extreme shyness made
performing difficult. In 1958 she appeared in the chorus and sang one solo
number in Mort Sahl's short-lived Broadway show "The Next President," but as the
'60s dawned she found herself at loose ends.

By chance, Albert Grossman, who managed a struggling folk singer named Peter
Yarrow and would later take on Mr. Dylan as a client, was intent on creating an
updated version of the Weavers for the baby-boom generation. He envisioned two
men and a woman with the crossover appeal of the Kingston Trio. Mr. Yarrow,
talking to Grossman in the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, noticed Ms.
Travers's photograph on the wall and asked who she was. "That's Mary Travers,"
Grossman said. "She'd be good if you could get her to work."

Mr. Yarrow went to Ms. Travers's apartment on Macdougal Street, across from the
Gaslight, one of the principal folk clubs. They harmonized on "Miner's
Lifeguard," a union song, and decided that their voices blended. To fill out the
trio, Ms. Travers suggested Noel Stookey, a friend doing folk music and stand-up
comedy at the Gaslight.

After rehearsing for seven months, with the producer and arranger Milt Okun
coaching them, Peter, Paul and Mary — Mr. Stookey adopted his middle name, Paul,
because it sounded better — began performing in 1961 at Folk City and the Bitter
End. The next year they released their first album.

Virtually overnight Peter, Paul and Mary became one of the most popular
folk-music groups in the world. The albums "Moving" and "In the Wind," both
released in 1963, rose to the top of the charts and stayed there for months. In
concert the group's direct, emotional style of performance lifted audiences to
their feet to deliver rapturous ovations.

Ms. Travers, onstage, drew all eyes as she shook her hair, bobbed her head in
time to the music and clenched a fist when the lyrics took a dramatic turn. On
instructions from Grossman, who wanted her to retain an air of mystery, she
never spoke. The live double album "In Concert" (1964) captures the fervor of
their performances.

On television the group's mildly bohemian look — Ms. Travers favored beatnik
clothing and Mr. Yarrow and Mr. Stookey had mustaches and goatees — gave
mainstream audiences their first glimpse of a subculture that had previously
been ridiculed on shows like "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis."

"You cannot overemphasize those beards," Mr. Wald said. "They looked like
Greenwich Village to the rest of America. They were the first to go mainstream
with an artistic, intellectual, beat image."

Although the arrival of the Beatles and other British invasion bands spelled the
end of the folk revival, Peter, Paul and Mary remained popular throughout the
1960s. The albums "A Song Will Rise" (1965), "See What Tomorrow Brings" (1965)
and "Album 1700" (1967) sold well, as did the singles "For Lovin' Me" and "Early
Morning Rain," both by Gordon Lightfoot, and Mr. Dylan's "When the Ship Comes
In." The gently satirical single "I Dig Rock and Roll Music" (1967) reached the
Top 10, and "Leaving on a Jet Plane" (1969), their last hit, reached No. 1 on
the charts.

In 1970, after releasing the greatest-hits album "Ten Years Together," the group
disbanded. Ms. Travers embarked on a solo career, with limited success,
releasing five albums in the 1970s. The first, "Mary" (1971), was the most
successful, followed by "Morning Glory" (1972), "All My Choices" (1973),
"Circles" (1974) and "It's in Everyone of Us" (1978).

Ms. Travers's first three marriages ended in divorce. She is survived by her
fourth husband, Ethan Robbins; two daughters, Erika Marshall of Naples, Fla.,
and Alicia Travers of Greenwich, Conn.; a sister, Ann Gordon of Oakland, Calif.;
and two grandchildren.

Peter, Paul and Mary reunited to perform at a benefit to oppose nuclear power in
1978 and thereafter kept to a limited schedule of tours around the world. Many
of their concerts benefited political causes. "I was raised to believe that
everybody has a responsibility to their community and I use the word very
loosely," Ms. Travers told The Times in 1999. "It's a big community. If I get
recognized in the middle of the Sinai Desert I have a big community."

It was a faithful community. Musical fashions changed, but fans stayed loyal to
the music and the political ideals of the group. Ms. Travers once told the music
magazine Goldmine, "People say to us, `Oh, I grew up with your music,' and we
often say, sotto voce, `So did we.' "