Peter, Paul, & ......

I knew she was ill, had leukemia.  But when I logged onto a fly fishing forum last night just after ten PM, the brief mention of her death, posted by another folk music fan, hit me hard. 

We Boomers have seen a lot of our heroes and friend vanish as they succumb to accident, assasination, and illness.  We learned early on that heroes often go too quickly.  John and Robert Kennedy were shot, Martin Luther King Jr. fell to a bullet, Astronauts Grissom, Chaffee, & White burned in a faulty Apollo prototype, flairing brightly into history.  58,000 of my brothers and sisters in arms fell to the VietNam War. The space shuttle devoured two crews, reminding us that the cost of technical progress in any field is often written in blood. All of these deaths hit some or all of us like a hammer blow to the solar plexus.

But Mary Travers death came differently.  It flowed over me, much like her voice would flow over and around us as she stepped up to the microphone and added her voice, that sultry, soft, but incredibly powerful siren's voice, to the beautiful harmony that was Peter, Paul, & Mary.  There's the sense that she knew it was coming and had time to say what she wanted to and needed to say.  I'm saddened by her death but happy that she is no longer fighting the effects of disease and medication.  It's a reminder of mortality, of change, time passing without concern for any of us. 
Mary had a voice that could make the listener think she was singing just for him, just to him or her; or that could rattle the walls of Kiel Opera House, my favorite St. Louis venue to see them.  Combine that with a face and form that had every male in the audience spinning dreams about her,  and she commanded attention on stage.  Gloria tells me that she considered Mary as a role model and hero.  I can understand that, at least I can try to when she explains it to me. 


I first saw Peter, Paul, & Mary in 1965,  Gloria had the advantage of living in the D.C. metro area, as well as having a year of age on me, so she was able to see them in one of her favorite local venues, as well as at the 1963 March on Washington.  We both happened to see them at the April anti-VietNam demonstration in 1965.  She, being a local, simply attended.  I was there on a high school band trip and spent the afternoon listening to music and speeches instead of using it for approved sight seeing.   One of those close temporal proximity situations that sometimes happen. Maybe we saw each other, maybe we didn't. 


The early and middle 1960's gave rise to the folk revival in American popular music.  Those were days before FM  radio, personal tape or CD players.  Music arrived on staticy AM airwaves, programmed, for the most part, by corporate decisions; on 12 " 33 & 1/3RPM vinyl multi-track albums, or 45 RPM smaller single-track records.  We took what the artists and the studio decided to put on the albums and what the DJ's programmed on the radio.   Music debuted on the coasts and filtered into the middle parts of the nation.

Because of the popularity of folk music, and because of the lack of any personal devices to use outside except a transistor radio, people would actually sit outdoors, around a campfire, and sing as long as the people with guitars could play,
In fact, as I write this, we're sitting here in our office, singing along to "One Kind Favor."  It's a dark little song with nice intricate guitar work, tight harmonies, and it sucks us in to join the harmony just as it did when it was newly recorded.

P,P,& M were often criticized, as were the other folk groups that actually made it big enough to be played on radio, with being to urbanized, too smooth, too far from the rural and old time roots of folk music.  They did take old songs and make them more palatable to the urban ear.  They did stress harmony, but so did the source music they adopted songs from.   The Carter Family worked just as hard to blend their voices as did P,P;&M. 

To  be fair, there were many folk singers from that era who were equally adept with their instruments, who wrote their own lyrics, who crossed the stages of our youth but never had the good fortune to explode into fame.  Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, John B. Sebastian, Judy Collins, Joannie  Mitchell, worked hard at their craft but either reached fame in a different genre or never quite left anything for us but excellent music on vinyl.  A manager, a lucky break, a loyal following, a certain look and sound.  What ever it was that lit the fuse, P,P, &am;M rode the rocket and stayed at altitude long enough to become icons and role models. 

They inspired millions of us to learn guitar, to sing, to sing together.  I freely admit that I sat for hours, playing an album over and over, trying to capture one little bit of Yarrow picking, one little bit of Stookey to add to my skill set.  The two of them meshed so beautifully that it was often hard to decide which style to use when I was playing that particular song.  Even today, I still rank their collabaration among the best acoustic pairings I've ever been privileged to hear. 

Mary, along with Peter and Paul, were not just performers cashing in on the folk revival and the social changes of the 60's.  The folk musicians of the day were often interlinked with the civil rights and anti-war movements.  They graced stages all over the nation, not just singing about what they believed in but putting their time, and to some degree their personal safety and fortunes on the line.  The McCarthy era was far from over and black listing was a very real threat for musicians.  They never chickened out, never refused to take the risk.  They remain, not only musical, but personal heroes and role models.

I'm going to miss Mary Travers now that she has left us.  I'm going to miss seeing her face pop up during a PBS pledge drive.  I'm not going to miss her voice, not going to miss her harmonies.  Like most of the folk revival musicians, she and her partners recorded lots of music that we will listen to when the mood strikes us, when we want to hear that sultry voice and remember being in the audience as she sang to us.  We have photos to remind us of how much she fueled our desires.  Her long blonde hair and the emotion and empathy that was there in her face as she sang will be, forever, a part of my  youth.  I'm very lucky to have grown up when I did, to have gained part of my musical education from Peter, Paul, &  Mary.

When I was working up amateur sets, when I was playing at campfires, I would work up renditions of songs that might never have been played on radio, that many people had never heard, that were easy to sing along with, but not the standard top 40 fare.  Invariably, the call would come for "500 Miles," "If I Had A Hammer," "Lemon Tree," or other standards.  I'd play them for the crowd but resent the loss of oportunity to play what I really wanted to play. I'm sure that some of my irritation and resentment seeped out and was evident.  Yet, Peter, Paul, & Mary - for that matter, any band I've ever heard, has spent countless hours on many stages playing to radio favorites.  It must be nearly impossible to suppress the desire to play something that wasn't a chart topper, that hasn't been performed past the point of boredome.  Some performers just go through the motions, their lack of interest is readily apparent. I've never heard Mary Travers or her partners deliver anything less than full attention to the task at hand.  They made everyone of us at every appearance believe that they were as eager to play for us as they were back in 1964.  How?  I can't tell you how they maintained that level of sincerity and interest.  I'm just glad they could and that they showed me that it is important to do that.

So I've listened to the old favorites, the top 40 songs they chose to include in the "In Concert" album.  I found them rewarding and interesting again, demanding that I sing along.  Thanks, Mary.

Bodies age and diseases change appearances.  This last image I found of Mary, borrowed from the P,P,&M web site, credited to Kevin Mazur,  shows her surrounded by her musical partners.  The long blonde hair is gone.  So what!  So is much of my graying black hair.  The great smile and the brilliant eyes that have always been there look back at me, at all her fans, friends, and the world around her.
The physical form is gone from us, her beauty, her mastry of song, her concern for the world, for tikkun olam, her voice, will be with us as long as we can sing together.  In this house, there's always music.  Our heroes may not be with us any more, but they are never far from us.

And with that in mind:

If you miss the train I'm on you will know that I am gone

You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles.