Mary Travers

Lover of Words

Mary Interviewing Refugees in El Salvador

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You know Mary Travers as one third of Peter, Paul, and Mary, but do you know that she was also a writer? 

Mary began her writing career with columns and other personal essays for the Bucks County Courier Times, a daily newspaper in suburban Philadelphia, in the late1980s. It wasn’t a planned move. It happened after she’d been chastised by an op-ed in the New York Post titled “If I Had a Hammer and Sickle” for hosting Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega at a luncheon in the aftermath of his being spurned by the Reagan administration at the United Nations. That controversy is a story for another day, but I mention it now as the start of the 25-year-long writer-editor relationship between Mary and Mike Renshaw, who was then editor of the Courier Times. Stung by the criticism and condescending tone of the Post op-ed, she had consulted Mike, whom she knew through Peter, about how to respond, and he told her to write an op-ed. She chose to write it for Mike’s paper rather than for the Post, and soon she was writing a regular column that ran for several years in the Courier Times. When the column ended, they continued the friendship as he became her unofficial editor.

After Mary was diagnosed with leukemia in 2007, she and Mike discussed writing a book about her life, but not a “kiss-and-tell” autobiography. Mike suggested that she begin with her completed works, published and unpublished, including transcripts of her radio show. They soon began work on this collection, which was still not finished when Mary died of complications from chemotherapy and radiation in 2009. Before her death, she had asked Mike to take over their project. In consultation with Mary’s family and with Peter and Noel, Mike completed the book, which was released in early 2013. 

The following is a brief account of some of the challenges Mary faced as she became a woman whose words—sung, spoken, and written—were heard and read around the world.

When manager Albert Grossman brought Peter, Noel, and Mary together as a trio, he was well aware that the only other woman in a folk group at the time was Ronnie Gilbert, a member of the seminal group, the Weavers. Think of the other popular folk groups of the era—The Kingston Trio, The Brothers Four, The Limelighters—all men.  To the trio Mary brought performance experience in Bob DeCormier’s group, The Young Jewish Folksingers and in the Song Swappers, a small group of singers who recorded with Pete Seeger for Folkways records. Although ahead of his time in many ways, Grossman curiously suggested that Mary not speak on stage, ostensibly to create a kind of mystique. Maybe Mary was comfortable with that directive at first because she was shy during early years of the trio’s professional career, but within a few years she found her voice in more ways than one—as a writer, a social activist, and a keen observer of politics, both in the U.S.and abroad.  

Mary’s parents, Robert and Virginia Travers, were both newspaper reporters who married young and separated while she was still a toddler. When Virginia found a newspaper job in New York City, mother and child moved to Greenwich Village. Needing someone to take care of Mary and the household, Virginia found Lila Turner, an African-American woman, who lived with her family in Harlem. Lila was arguably the most influential female role model in Mary’s childhood, providing the kind of attention that Virginia neither had the time or emotional energy to give. Lila would take Mary home with her with on some weekends to give Virginia a break, and Mary was happy to be a part of Lila’s household. Although Virginia taught Mary about racial inequality, much of Mary’s understanding of civil rights came through her friendship with Lila and her family.

In high school Mary felt like a misfit because she was the tallest girl in her class at a private school and because she found some subjects difficult, especially math. She wrote, “I was an educational disaster waiting for the ax to fall.” In her junior year the school administrators told her that she was too far behind to graduate. Later she went to a large public high school for six months of the eleventh grade and excelled in English because she was “a ravenous consumer of books.” However, math again was her nemesis, and her formal education was over. She wrote, “For years, not having graduated or gone to college made me feel stupid and inferior. It wasn't till I was 30 that I began to realize by continuous reading I had gone beyond most of my classmates. They had stopped reading when school ended. I had kept going.”

Indeed!  In his foreword to Mary Travers: A Woman’s Words, Peter Yarrow wrote, 

Mary was in love with the printed page and more than anyone I ever knew seemed to be able to literally go to another place, in heart and mind. Frequently on the road, she would turn to Noel and me when we were in a car or backstage in rehearsal before a show and read a sentence or a turn of a phrase that struck her as beautifully crafted or powerfully stated. 

Working with Noel on his autobiography and observing the power dynamics of the trio, I’ve found they were remarkably collegial for a professional team of two men and a woman in the ‘60s. Here’s Mary’s description from a 1965 interview: “There is absolute democracy in our camp. And I mean it’s total, no two to one business. One veto and that’s it—we don’t do it, whether it’s selecting a song  or a city to perform in.” When the trio recorded albums, they left three tracks for individual solos, and at concerts, the second half allowed for solo time before coming back together as a trio for their closing songs. Both on stage and off they were distinct individuals who learned to treat each other as equals in creative collaboration.

That learning didn’t happen instantly. Mary writes that when the trio started rehearsing, the guys were not yet what she would call “liberated men”:  

Nice, a little old-fashioned for musicians, but all in all, pretty traditional. Meaning they didn’t share power readily. Peter and Paul weren’t ready to deal with me as an equal. I wasn’t ready to give in. So we fought, we cried, we laughed, we grew, and at the same time we were becoming famous, we kept trying to learn how to become equals without killing each other. Needless to say, we all learned.

The music helped us grow because it was about real things other than dating behavior. Folk music is about peace, the waste of war, and children’s innocence. About love lost and love found. About dreams and nightmares. About the human condition. And always about making life better for everyone. 

In Noel’s introduction to the chapter containing Mary’s monologues Mary Travers: A Woman’s Voice, he said, “When Peter, Mary, and I became the Peter, Paul and Mary trio in the early ‘60s, it was pretty much understood and encouraged between the three of us that we were contributing individual gifts to a collective voice.”  But after their sabbatical in the 1970s, the trio expressed their individual growth by rearranging many of their initial onstage roles. Peter became more relaxed and playful, Noel’s new and evolving spiritual sense was revealed, and Mary began generating comic monologues and often found herself speaking as a social commentator. As the trio’s causes expanded in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Mary’s in-depth research and wide knowledge about global issues were evident not only on stage and in interviews but also through her essays and social commentary. 

As she was creating many of these articles in the back seat of transport to many a Peter, Paul and Mary concert, Noel helped her, a self-proclaimed Luddite, to solve some of her early technical computer problems. Watching her work, he realized that “she was accepting the full range of her gifts—not only speaking to thousands from a concert platform but beginning to reach hundreds of thousands through her inspired and inspiring writings.” 

When former Senator John Kerry addressed the gathered community of Mary’s friends and family at her memorial celebration at Riverside Church, New York City, on November 9, 2009, he quipped, “I think if Mary were here, she’d look out at all of you and say this is like a class reunion of the Nixon enemies list.”  He was looking at, among others, journalist Bill Moyers, former senators George McGovern and Max Cleland, and Dolores Huerter, one of the founders of the Farm Workers Union—all there to attest to Mary’s courage, compassion, intellect, and commitment to justice and freedom for all. 

In her video statement at the Riverside memorial service, journalist and social activist Gloria Steinem commented on what a role model for women Mary had been: 

I’m sure that it was helpful for me that a woman would be strong and have her own voice and be her own self and be expressive of what she really thought instead of what we were trained to do in the ‘60s which was to giggle and say “how clever you are!”  

Steinem could have been speaking for multiple generations when she said that Mary “seemed to us to be a free woman, and that helped us to be free.”

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Connections:  

Read an article here from the Bucks County Courier Times about Mary’s book “A Woman’s Words” co-written with Mike Renshaw, and see information here from  Amazon regarding its purchase.

Vibrations:

Hear “But a Moment,” a poem written by Mary for her mother and set to music by Noel.   It’s found on the PP&M Lifelines album, and Noel’s instrumental version appears on his album Facets.

Resonance:

Mary faced many challenges as she found and followed her vocational path.  Which  do you identify with or which have you seen your wives, daughters, sisters, or mothers face?