Mary Travers

With her long, flowing, blonde hair, and crystal-clear soprano vocals, Mary Travers was a major influence on the folk music of the 1960s and early '70s. A founding member of Peter, Paul and Mary, Travers not only became one of the most commercially successful folk performers, but used her position to become an inspirational political spokesperson. Together with Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey, Travers performed at civil rights rallies with Dr. Martin Luther King in Birmingham, AL, and Washington, D.C., and, later, at numerous anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, fund-raisers, and teach-ins. During the '80s, after a hiatus working together for most of the previous decade, she and her longtime performing partners became heavily involved with raising the consciousness of Americans about human rights abuses in Latin America. A native of Louisville, KY, and the daughter of journalists, Travers grew up in New York's Greenwich Village, where the combination of her parents' professions and the tolerant, relatively free-spirited ambience of the neighborhood in which she lived had a profound effect on her sensibilities about art, life, and living. As a youngster, she also became enchanted with the American folk songs played by the Weavers, Leadbelly, and Woody Guthrie. While in high school, Travers became a regular performer at the Sunday afternoon folk music sessions at Washington Square Park, which were already a neighborhood institution in the early '50s -- apart from being a recreational center for the Village's resident iconoclast population, the park also served as the campus for New York University, which surrounds it, and had long been (and remains to this day) a magnet for young listeners and casual strollers. Together with a teenage group, the Songswappers, Travers...