Mary Travers (November 9, 1936 – September 16, 2009) was an American singer-songwriter and member of the folk music group Peter, Paul and Mary, along with Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey. Peter, Paul and Mary was one of the most successful folk music groups of the 1960s. A contralto, Travers released five solo albums in addition to her work with Peter, Paul and Mary.
Mary Allin Travers was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the daughter of journalists who moved the family to Manhattan's bohemian Greenwich Village. She quickly became enamoured with folk performers like the Weavers, and was soon performing with Pete Seeger, a founding member of the Weavers who lived in the same building as the Travers family.With a group called the Song Swappers, Travers backed Seeger on one album and two shows at Carnegie Hall. She also appeared (as one of a group of folk singers) in a short-lived 1958 Broadway show called The Next President, starring comedian Mort Sahl.
It wasn't until she met up with Yarrow and Stookey that Travers would taste success on her own. Yarrow was managed by Albert B. Grossman, who later worked in the same capacity for Bob Dylan. The budding trio, boosted by the arrangements of Milt Okun, spent seven months rehearsing in her Greenwich Village apartment before their 1961 public debut at the Bitter End.
liberal beliefs while creating music that resonated in the American mainstream.
The group collected five Grammy Awards for their three-part harmony on their most enduring songs. At one point in 1963, three of their albums were in the top six Billboard best-selling LPs as they became the biggest stars of the folk revival movement. It was heady stuff for a trio that had formed in the early 1960s in Greenwich Village, running through simple tunes like Mary Had a Little Lamb.
Their debut album came out in 1962, and immediately scored a pair of hits with their versions of If I Had a Hammer and Lemon Tree. The former won them Grammys for best folk recording, and best performance by a vocal group. Their next album, Moving, included the hit tale of innocence lost, "Puff, The Magic Dragon", which reached No. 2 on the U.S. charts.
The trio's third album, In the Wind, featured three songs by the 22-year-old Bob Dylan. "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "Blowin' in the Wind" reached the U.S. top 10, bringing Dylan's material to a massive audience; the latter shipped 300,000 copies during one two-week period.
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| Mary with Bob Dylan |
With the advent of the Beatles and Dylan's switch to electric guitar, the folk boom disappeared. Travers expressed disdain for folk-rock. But the trio continued their success, scoring with the tongue-in-cheek single I Dig Rock and Roll Music, a gentle parody of the Mamas and the Papas, in 1967 and the John Denver-penned
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Leaving on a Jet Plane two years later.
In 1969, the group earned their final Grammy for Peter, Paul and Mommy, which won for best children's album. They disbanded in 1971, launching solo careers - Travers released five albums - that never achieved the heights of their collaborations. Mary (1971), Morning Glory (1972), All My Choices (1973), Circles (1974) and It's in Everyone of Us (1978).
Over the years they enjoyed several reunions, including a performance at a 1978 anti-nuclear benefit organized by Yarrow and a 35th anniversary album, Lifelines, with fellow folkies Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Dave Van Ronk and Seeger.
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They remained politically active as well, performing at the 1995 anniversary of the Kent State shootings and performing for California strawberry pickers.
On 7 December 2004 Travers disclosed that she was receiving chemotherapy for a rare form of leukemia, but expected to make a full recovery and in 2005, she had undergone a successful bone marrow transplant and was able to return to performing after that. But by mid-2009, her condition had worsened again. She died on September 16, 2009, at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut, from complications related to the marrow transplant and other treatments. She was 72 years old.
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Travers was married four times. Her first brief union, to John Filler, produced her elder daughter, Erika, in 1960. In 1963, she married Barry Feinstein. Her younger daughter, Alicia, was born in 1966, and the couple divorced the following year. In the 1970s, she was married to Gerald Taylor. In 1991, she married restaurateur Ethan Robbins; Travers lived with Robbins in the small town of Redding, Connecticut, for the remainder of her life.
(Edited from Wikipedia & The Telegraph)
Here's a clip of Mary Travers from the Morecombe and Wise Show (1972 BBC) The laughter at the start was for a comedy skit which preceded the song.