Children one and all mary travers5/6/2023 ![]() Though it’s been years since I’ve seen him, I remember the electric impact of PPM singing Jimmie Driftwood’s ‘Long Chain On’: What their songs provided was something different – rich imagery, social comment and the politics of resistance. Peter Paul and Mary sometimes get a bad press, but I never saw any contradiction between listening to the Beatles and the Stones, or the latest top twenty on Radio Luxembourg, and being inspired by the stars of the sixties folk revival. The follow-up, In The Wind, included three Dylan tracks (‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, in a version I have always loved, ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ and ‘Quit Your Lowdown Ways’) as well as ‘Long Chain On’, ‘Rocky Road’ and ‘All My Trials’. Their debut contained ‘Early In The Morning’ (featured recently on Mad Men), ‘500 Miles’, ‘If I Had a Hammer’,’Lemon Tree’ and Seeger’s ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’. I played their first two LPs till the vinyl smoked, alongside The Times They Are A Changin’ and Joan Baez 1 and 2. After seven months of rehearsals, the group made its debut in 1961 performing songs carefully arranged by Milk Okun. ![]() She became a disciple of the Weavers and performed with Seeger before Yarrow and his manager Albert Grossman (who later steered Bob Dylan’s career) recruited her for the trio. Travers was born in Kentucky but attended high school in New York’s West Village, where her family lived in the same building as Pete Seeger. Though they broke up in 1952, the Weavers planted two seeds in American popular culture: one was the folk song revival of the late fifties and the other, a byproduct of their blacklisting, was the emergence of a politically focused branch of folk music. They could trace their roots and inspiration back to music and events from the late ’40s, and the founding of the Weavers. Along with Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, they provided a doorway to a rich musical tradition. Peter, Paul and Mary were the most popular folk group of the 1960s and their music had a profound effect on my musical appreciation and political development at that time. Mary Travers, who with Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow helped popularise folk music in the 1960s as Peter, Paul and Mary, has died aged 72.
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