Mary Travers: her daughter remembers
September 18, 2009
Rita Watson
Despite the rumors of a funeral today for Mary Travers, it appears
that plans have not been announced or finalized.
The legendary folksinger from the group Peter, Paul, and Mary, died
this week at age 72.
Lots of stories surface during such times and I was touched two of
them. One of my colleagues was a neighbor in Redding, Conn. whose
backyard was so close, she could hear Mary singing to children who
might be visiting. It appears now that these could have been her
grandchildren.
Mary Travers had two daughters and Alicia spoke recently with the
NewsTimes reporter Lisa Chamoff. Lisa tells me she didn't hear of
any funeral plans just yet.
In her phone interview we learn this about Alice: "When she was a
young girl, it was not unusual for Alicia Travers to come home from
school and see Peter, Paul and Mary rehearsing in her Manhattan living room.
"For Travers, 43, a Greenwich resident, the folk trio whose 1960s
songs made her mother, Mary, an icon of the civil rights and antiwar
movements, is part of her family. . . Social action was a big part
of life with Mary Travers. In 1984, Alicia went down to Washington,
D.C., with her mother and grandmother, Virginia Coigney, to protest
apartheid in South Africa, and the three were arrested.
"'Through years of teaching, it just became second nature,'" Alicia
said. "'You wanted to give back. Although I don't teach anymore, I
hold that dear to me.'"
To read the full interview, please go to: Mary's legacy: Alicia
Travers recalls her folksinger mother's influence [see below]
In the world of love and marriage, the Peter, Paul, and Mary trio
instilled values. Many of us who grew up with them, still treasure
those values. And I firmly believe that marriages or relationships
that survive through the years are those in which two people share a
sense of respect, commitment, and a sense of purpose greater than
themselves. This was the legacy of Mary Travers. Her own marriages
may not have survived, but she taught us the lesson of love.
According to Wikipedia Travers's first three marriages ended in
divorce. She is survived by her fourth husband, restaurateur Ethan
Robbins (married 1991), two daughters, Erika Marshall (born 1960) of
Naples FL, and Alicia Travers (born 1965) of Greenwich CT;
half-brother John Travers;[9] a sister, Ann Gordon, Ph.D. of Oakland
CA, and two grandchildren, Wylie and Virginia.
--------
Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary Dies at 72
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/arts/music/17travers.html
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: September 16, 2009
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.' "
--------
Mary's legacy: Alicia Travers recalls her folksinger mother's influence
[Originally at: http://www.newstimes.com/ci_13361579 - now removed]
By Lisa Chamoff
Staff Writer
Posted: 09/17/2009
When she was a young girl, it was not unusual for Alicia Travers to
come home from school and see Peter, Paul and Mary rehearsing in her
Manhattan living room.
For Travers, 43, a Greenwich resident, the folk trio whose 1960s
songs made her mother, Mary, an icon of the civil rights and antiwar
movements, is part of her family.
Mary Travers died Wednesday in Danbury Hospital after a battle with
leukemia. The longtime Redding resident was 72.
Alicia saw her share of concerts with Travers, Peter Yarrow and Noel
"Paul" Stookey, mostly as an adult. After disbanding in 1970, the
group reunited in 1978, when Alicia was 11. What she remembers most
is the meaning behind the music. Mary Travers would tell stories
about the 1963
March on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr., where Peter, Paul
and Mary performed and King gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
"They sang songs, but they discussed them before they started to sing
them," Alicia said in phone interview Thursday. "That kind of stuff
got shared at the dinner table. It wasn't so much music as it was
words, thoughts and the world and how people treated one another."
The trio also recorded Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" and Pete
Seeger's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" which became anthems of
Vietnam War protests.
Alicia -- whose father, Barry Feinstein, Peter, Paul and Mary's
photographer, was Travers' second husband -- moved to Greenwich 12
years ago to be closer to her older sister, Erika, who later moved
to Florida. She was also near her mother, who already lived in
Redding with husband Ethan Robbins.
While Mary Travers didn't urge her two daughters to pursue careers in
music, she did expect them to give back to society, which was an
influence in Alicia's becoming a special education teacher. Alicia
even did her student teaching at the Little Red School House, the
progressive Greenwich Village school that her mother attended.
After teaching for seven years, Alicia went into the restaurant
industry, managing the former Dome restaurant on Greenwich Avenue and
f.i.s.h in Port Chester, N.Y. She now works for CitationShares, a
Greenwich-based company that provides fractional ownership of airplanes.
Social action was a big part of life with Mary Travers. In 1984,
Alicia went down to Washington, D.C., with her mother and
grandmother, Virginia Coigney, to protest apartheid in South Africa,
and the three were arrested.
"Through years of teaching, it just became second nature," Alicia
said. "You wanted to give back. Although I don't teach anymore, I
hold that dear to me."
In the last several months, Alicia said she and her mother mostly
focused on their family. Mary Travers would tell stories of her
mother, a former newspaper reporter, author and scriptwriter who
eventually worked in public relations at Danbury Hospital.
Alicia and her mother did get to share in the election of Barack
Obama as the first black president.
"She was incredibly proud on that inauguration day as an American
because that's a perfect example of her, along with many, many, many
others, all of that hard work paid off in that instance," Alicia said.
It is part of the heritage that Alicia is proud to share.
"Her legacy to me is what she, Peter and Paul contributed to this
nation to get us where we are today," Alicia said. "Her works and her
presence and all the selfless acts of my mother, that's what I really
relish. I'm so proud of her."
--
Staff Writer Lisa Chamoff can be reached at lisa.chamoff@scni.com or
203-625-4439.
.
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