A Great Voice Rests: Thank You, Mary Travers
Posted by Mike E on September 17, 2009
It is hard to capture how much Peter, Paul and Mary were part of the very atmosphere — in the New York left subculture as the civil rights movement rumbled in the South, and the soul stirrings of the 60s were just starting.
They commercialized the folk current, and started the breakthrough from a small cafe-and-summer-camp underground to a much wider audience… just as the left politics they embodied was starting to break through as well. It was a time when Kumbaya was a heartfelt anthem, not a mocking rightwing punchline.
Their music and politics (so heavily influenced by the Communist Party milieu) were soon both over-shadowed by far more radical and hard-driving currents — by the emergence of defiant revolutionary politics, by the creative explosion of new Black music, and by the rebel drumbeats of rock-and-roll.
But Peter, Paul and Mary played their role — helping bringing leftism out of the closet where it had cowered, trembling, for so much of the 50s. By donning the moral righteousness of the civil rights movement, and by presenting a claim to a popular authenticity (through the questionably authentic form of folk) — Pete, Paul and Mary found the courage (and audience!) to sing their hearts out, and help wake many of us up.
I was a boy in New York City’s Greenwich Village in 1960. I remember well those days, those circles, that music, the Bitter End, the Cafe Wha? and all those new hopes rising suddenly.
Let’s not share moment of silence for Mary, but instead a remembrance in song. Her songs are designed for singing along together.
Goodbye Mary Tavers. Thank you.
chegitz guevara said
My mom used to play PPM for me all th time when I was growing up, and of course, even in the early 70s, when my memories really begin, PPM was still a huge part of the culture. I remember (after the fact) that the controversy around Puff the Magic Dragon was one of my first clues that maybe, just maybe, the people in charge of this society didn’t have a clue themselves. In their own small ways, they contributed to many radicalizations. No wonder the establishment hated them.
Little known fact: Peter, Paul, and Mary was actually a quartet. You can see the fourth member of the group in the video for Five Hundred Miles dimly lit in the background. His name is Richard Kniss.
Tell No Lies said
I think this sort of appreciation of the valuable roles that are played by people and groups that may not go all of the way down the path we think best is critical to nurturing back into being the sort of broad radical culture from which any genuinely revolutionary movement will need to draw sustenance.
I listened to PPM a little as a kid too and saw them perform live once in a small club. Even as a kid they weren’t really my thing, a little too sweet and earnest even for my sentimental self, but I always recognized them as part of the larger thing I was a part of. Thanks for this.
Mike E said
TNL writes:
I am trying hard to be appropriately generous here, and appreciative of what this wave of folk singers did (in fact) contribute.
At the time, much of that world felt very very old to me, and very tame, and very self righteous in its conservatism. Not Peter, Paul and Mary, but that general old left of that time (late 50s and early 60s).
Their politics and music tried so hard to be “goody-goody” and non-threatening in a way i found cloying and anti-rebellious. It had to do, in some ways, to how the CPUSA trained people to respond to McCarthyism… by craving respectability, posturing with purist virtue and adopting a populist claim to authenticity, and by disapproving of any raw, in-your-face, rebellious defiance.
It all seemed round shouldered and shuffling to me (and not just me). Not Dylan, of course, who came out of that world but found a different voice (and audience) — but those lefty veterans of that 50s generation who thought they were being oh-so-very-bold just by peeping out of their covers, showing their faces and speaking a few guarded tones in public.
Their whole world seemed to have an ashy coating of cringing and defeat about them. They had been cauterized by their disappointments of the 1950s — and not in a good way.
What was a separate matter: I always felt that there was a fake claim to authenticity made by folk music.
This political style and movement was really an invention, a concoction, born of populism, social realism and workerism — mainly around the remnants of the CPUSA. It presented itself as if it was a genuine popular musical current with deep roots among the people. (Just as the CP presented itself politically.) Folk borrowed from some real traditions, but those were pretty cloistered and parochial musical forms with very little surviving presence in our time. It was almost as if they wanted to invent a white people’s equivalent of the blues. The adoption of flannel wearing, folksie, gosh-darn language seemed (to me) to invent a volkish mythology — that arose (not actually from the people and their evolving culture) but from a particular political view of the working class. A romantization of yeomen and workers as Innocent, sincere, plain spoken, discrete, modest, not demanding. While the old left was inventing and codifying this folk music, the rebel currents among Black people and the youth were inventing rock and roll and an explosion of other new Black musical forms. And the conflict became rather sharp.
Part of that conflict is the new replacing the old. And it is something we need to understand deeply (and quite a bit more charitably than i did as a teenager who, as you can tell, hated that whole folky vibe). Because we too need help the new replace the old — and not get caught on the wrong side of that.
I think the conflict had to do with fidelity to past events, while new conjunctures were exploding. There were whole cultural expressions that arose from the 1930s, and from what leftists were trying to do there. And these expressions (Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson etc.) morphed yet again through the dark experience of McCarthyism (and the somewhat cowering self-denial that some leftists adopted).
And so when we arrived in the 1960s, this folk music spoke in favor of what was rumbling (particularly civil rights, of a particularly civil kind). It promoted some of the “freedom songs” that genuinely WERE powerful (“We shall Overcome” etc.)
But really, those currents and forms were aging badly, and were increasingly out of step with the much more raw and defiant radicalism that “the Movement” (and many of the people) were going to adopt over the 1960s.
It didn’t help that the folk music establishment (notoriously Irwin Silber and his influential Folkways magazine, speaking from CP orthodoxy) just HATED rock and roll. Or that they were quite vicious when Bob Dylan plugged in an electric guitar. (They called him all kinds of traitor and sell-out.)
It was an experience of both conservatism (i.e. clinging to their fidelity, which they had nurtured over the harsh times of the 50s), and also of an artistic formalism (which taught that certain forms of art and music were by their nature the best and that other forms, by their nature, were not.) There was a belief that folk music, because it was sing-along was inherently superior to other music (especially that performance-based music made by professionals, sold to record labels, difficult to sing in groups)… and so folk should be promoted (and really clung to) in a formalist way.
And the collisions were sharp because (in general) the old left just hated so much of the sixties — the black nationalism, the raw rebelliousness, the dismissal of respectability, the violence, the willingness to call ourselves communists and anti-patriots, the rock music, the new cultural forms (long hair, psychedelics etc.)… And in some ways, the folk music was part of that old left — and part of what was being shed.
I say all that to make two points:
1) We need to see the early folk music as both having made a real contribution (to civil rights and the breaking of the 1950s freeze) and also then being superceded by more radical forms of expression (more suitable for more radical times and movements).
2) We need ourselves not to make the mistake of the old CP — becoming fixed in time locked in verdicts and even in formalism… so that we can’t see, or appreciate, or embrace, or impact the new things arising around us.
And that to me is a background for wrestling with our memories of Peter, Paul and Mary (who were among the most political, and successful, and creative of the folk singers — though hardly among the most radical).
Mary Travers, of course, was never a trench fighter in these developing controversies. She was no cramped ideologue of folk dogma.
Mary was an artist. A wonderful singer who let her heart and sincerity spill out over us all. And we all remember that voice and those moments with fondness, and now sadness.
jp said
I’m in general agreement with Mike’s analysis of 60′s folk music. Woody Guthrie was a real folk musician, and a great writer/poet, but when Dylan adopted the Guthrie identity (via Ramblin’ Jack Elliot) this was just posing. What Dylan turned into, however, was authentic but only very vaguely leftish. A great poet in his prime, but he rejected the struggles of the 60′s after the civil rights movement.
I can remember my father, an intelligent, anti Vietnam war, WWII vet, objecting to Dylan, but expressing admiration for Simon and Garfunkel, who were directly in the pseudo-folk line. The popular front tradition was correct in believing that they could bring along some travelers with their earnestness (TNL’s word).
For a while in the 60′s, Charles Mingus, the great jazz composer/bassist, insisted on calling his music folk and it’s so labeled on some of his recordings from that era. He was right, of course, since black jazz musicians were part of a mostly non-conservatory tradition, being taught by elders and peers.
Adrienne said
Mike wrote:
Mike, I think you’re right that popular folk musicians were pretty much play acting a bunch of idealized, romanticized and invented roles from the 1940′s all the way into the 1960′s. However, I think you might be coming down a little too hard on the folk music tradition as a whole, and I have to strongly disagree that what they were drawing on was an inauthentic or rootless invention. You say that folk borrowed from some real traditions and I agree. The musical traditions of poor and marginalized people who left Europe and immigrated to the US.
There is a pretty direct line of descent that can easily be drawn to Folk and Old Time Mountain music from European folk music and story telling traditions. Most especially (though not exclusively) to the Celtic music of Ireland and Highland Scotland, as well as to English and Lowland Scottish country ballads and murder ballads. But once that music was transplanted to Appalachia and parts of the southern US, it almost immediately began to evolve and expand — into brand new Folk and Old Time-style tunes and ballads, and eventually into Bluegrass, Country, and Country-Western, and also Union organizing songs. So, even though I totally agree that the folk revival involved a lot of pretense and mythologizing, I really can’t go along with the idea that the musical cues and story telling traditions weren’t an authentic reflection of a huge number of people who had put down roots in this land.
To give an example of what I mean, take a song like Which Side Are You On. I think there is a lot of deep historical roots showing through in that tune, even though it was written for striking coal miners in the 1930′s.
I also think it’s clear that a lot of American folk music ended up being heavily influenced by black musical traditions — just as black music (which originally grew from African roots) was influenced by white folk traditions in return. In fact, don’t think this country would have ended up with such an awesome and numerous array of unique musical styles without a large amount of cross pollination between people and groups from all over taking place. And personally, I think that wide variety of musical expression is of the few things that can be considered truly great about America.
Well said.
RIP Ms. Travers.
Mike said
Mary Travers was the best. Her music will always ring in my heart. RIP, Mary!