Mary Travers, whose bell-clear alto defined songs of the folk era, stayed a true believer well into an age when true belief was enough to reduce many to the status of quaint oddity, like some lost soldier found on a South Pacific island, fighting on long past the truce.
When she died Wednesday at 72, Travers, the Mary in Peter, Paul and Mary, had moved through a century of seismic changes in art and politics and was among the first in the mainstream to fuse the two, never letting go of her belief in either.
"No matter what was going on in the culture they stayed true to their vision. I don't think they wavered at all," said Anne Feeney, a Pittsburgh folk musician whose song "Have You Been to Jail for Justice" was on the repertoire of the trio's later concerts.
Feeney's own life narrative was shaped in large part by the music of Peter, Paul and Mary. Travers, whose shank of blond hair and slinky frame masked a piercing, crystalline voice and a steely temperament, was genuinely unimpressed by marketing. She and her partners signed on to civil-rights marches knowing it could cost them the Southern "market." They did not view music as a market nor songs as a product.
Well before feminism gained a hold among American women, Travers stood out if only by her prominence in a trio with two men, neither one of whom was a husband or a boyfriend.
While college students and assorted dreamers were captivated by renditions of Will Hays and Pete Seeger's "If I Had A Hammer," or Dave Van Ronk's "Bamboo," Travers had a signature song: "No Other Name," written with the trio's Noel Paul Stookey.
You can know me, if you will
By the wind on the hill
You'll know me by no other name
She was, in many ways, not only the '60s, but the '70s and beyond, the occupant of a tumultuous life (four marriages) and almost poetic cycles of change.
Consider: In 1988, during one of PP&M's last concerts in Pittsburgh, she confided to the audience what she considered a special mortification. Her daughter, she said, had married a Republican.
The laughter was genuine, informed, perhaps, by the reality that some of those same people in the audience might share that son-in-law's politics now, their beliefs bent by the winds of change that saw Kennedy's New Frontier pass through Vietnam and Watergate to the Land of the 401(k).
Young, they came for the music and stayed for the message and, by the time death took Travers, the music seemed quaint, the message resurgent and a veritable cycle of history complete.
After all, a man who could not have voted in the South when Peter, Paul and Mary first raised their voices in song was now the president. Anti-war rallies were becoming commonplace.
Joe Hickerson, who shared writing credits with Pete Seeger on "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?," remembered Travers from a first meeting in 1957. Folk music was gaining interest on college campuses and he bumped into her as part of an ensemble of students who traveled to a gathering.
A few years later, he would add lyrics to a song Seeger had forgotten he wrote and it would travel to New York via a youth group he taught at a music camp. From there, Travers and her compatriots picked it up. They had to compete with another group, the Kingston Trio, for chart space with that tune. Where the Kingston Trio stayed solely with the music, Peter, Paul and Mary were unabashed in touting it as an anti-war song.
"They had a foot in both camps," Hickerson said.
Folk music once stood as its own industry, however briefly, before being subsumed in a variety of other forms. Ian Tyson of Ian and Sylvia trotted home to Alberta to host a country radio show. Barry McGuire left the New Christy Minstrels to proclaim "The Eve of Destruction." Bob Dylan, whose "Blowin' in the Wind" found a mainstream audience through the three-part harmony of Travers and her partners, picked up an electric guitar, and even dabbled in born-again Christianity for a while.
Travers and her group remained fixed in ideological amber. Anti-war rallies, pro-choice concerts, anti-nuke gatherings — wherever destiny called for an unaltered voice, PP&M stood firm. They might have blown in the wind, but they blew in only one direction.
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.