Mary Travers Remains Committed To Message
In the early ‘50s, Mary Travers was a skinny blond teen-ager growing up in Greenwich Village, prowling the teeming folk-music clubs, looking for a chance to sing informally with influential groups like the Weavers.
Today, Travers has a country place in Redding, Conn., a city place in New York and a central place in the collective consciousness of a nation.
Thirty-five years ago, Travers, 58, joined with Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey to form the folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary. They sang heartfelt songs like “If I Had a Hammer” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which achieved anthemic proportions in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s.
The trio has just released an astounding new album of collaborations with musical friends, young and old, and is embarking on a tour that will bring the group back out on the road. The tour will culminate at Kent State University on May 4, the 25th anniversary of the death of four students who were killed when Ohio National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of demonstrators.
In creating Peter, Paul & Mary’s latest album, “PPM: Lifelines,” the trio reached out to an eclectic collection of musical legacies and newer friends in collaborations that often incorporate these voices into the original trio. Joining PP&M are soul mates like Richie Havens and B.B. King; troubadours like John Gorka, Carly and Lucy Simon, and Holly Near; old hands like Jody Collins, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Dave Van Ronk; and mentors like Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman, members of the seminal folk group The Weavers, who were blacklisted and shunned during the communist witch hunts of the McCarthy era.
Travers, between timeouts to chase her Maine coon cat from a closet in her New York apartment, talked about music, activism, hope and life.
“Do I sometimes feel old?” repeats Travers, pondering the question with a deep breath. Then, with her characteristic playfulness: “Needless to say, although my head may not tell me I’m getting older, my knees tell me. They’re the traitors.”
Then thoughtfully: “I don’t feel old in the sense of infirm, but sometimes I feel old in talking to very young people. They are not flush with the idealism that young people were when I was a kid. They have a kind of cynicism - unearned, I might add - that makes you want to pick them up by the nape of the neck and say: ‘You don’t like the way the world is, well, change it, but don’t complain to me that it’s unchangeable, because I know different.’
“I recognize one simple fact,” she continues: “If you go for the all, you’re not going to get the all, but you get a lot more done than if you sat on your hands.”
She uses the civil rights movement as an example.
“We went from a society in the South where blacks didn’t vote to a society where government in some cases is being run by black people,” she says. “We went from a society where black people could not eat in a restaurant to a society where that’s not even a question.”
Travers is committed to the legacy of the ‘60s.
“The thing that my generation would love to pass on to the younger generation is the rewards for a life a passion,” she says.
“You meet the best people,” she says, naming Martin Luther King Jr., Bishop Desmond Tutu, John F. Kennedy, “people of such dignity and inspiration.”
And it’s therapeutic, she adds.
“There is something about extending yourself outward that is sanity-making,” Travers says.