When I was a child, there were certain things we watched every time PBS was willing to play them. For the December pledge season, this meant Peter, Paul & Mary: Holiday Concert. I must confess to never having been that adventurous, when it comes to music. There are very few bands that I discovered myself and considerably more that I’ve encountered because other people brought them to my attention or when they appeared on TV or in movies I liked, and Mom is a huge Peter, Paul & Mary fan. Basically, the last time my mother cared about new music was around the time they were big, and she passed that love on to us. My younger sister even got to call in our family’s pledge one year and talk to Paul Stookey!
Though Travers was born in Louisville, Kentucky, her family moved to Greenwich Village in 1938, when she was two. While attending the Little Red School House, an experimental progressive school, she met both Pete Seeger, with whom her career would be not entirely disconnected, and Paul Robeson, who sang her lullabies when she was a child. Her IMDb page claims that folk singing was a hobby for her and that she’d worked as a dental technician, but she also dropped out of high school to perform with a group called “the Song Swappers,” so I don’t know how plausible that is.
According to the biography on her official webpage, she and “the boys” started singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” together in Noel Paul Stookey’s East Village apartment, and they carried on for fifty years (minus eight the group spent broken up which they kind of gloss over in the bio). They only had one number one hit, a cover of John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” On the other hand, they won five Grammys, and many of their albums topped the charts, which I suspect to be true of that sort of performer. Like, I don’t think people were running to the stores for the newest Joan Baez single, because if you’re the sort of person to listen to Joan Baez, you want The Joan Baez Ballad Book, not “Barbara Allen.”
Okay, I admit it. I’m unabashedly into folk songs, and the reason I mention that specific Joan Baez is that it’s one of the few music purchases I’ve made that wasn’t influenced by people I knew personally. But since one of the first albums I owned was Peter, Paul & Mary’s In Concert, I think there’s a fairly straight line, there. Part of me wanted to be the ethereal Baez, with her high, pure, otherworldly voice, but realistically, I’m much more a Mary, and not just because we have a similar body type—and, frankly, much more similar voices. There’s a hearty earthiness to Mary Travers that I connect with even as I know all the words to “Mary Hamilton.”
Which all explains why I was there in the dark watching Inside Llewyn Davis feeling the most incredible sympathy for Carey Mulligan as Jean. It wasn’t easy for a woman in the folk-singing milieu. Al Capp actually did a cruel parody that he swore wasn’t really Joan Baez, but come on—she was called “Joanie Phonie.” The women of folk were treated differently, and I think it’s to her great credit that we still remember Mary Travers even when people I knew were wondering why “Five Hundred Miles” wasn’t nominated for Best Original Song. I knew all the words to it already. It’s on In Concert.
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