Honorees Paul Stookey, Mary Travers and Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary arrive at the 2006 Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York June 15, 2006

Mary Travers of the folk music trio Peter, Paul & Mary, whose versions of “If I Had a Hammer” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” became anthems of the US civil rights movement, has died. She was 72.

An e-mailed statement from the trio’s family, friends and associates described Travers as “a passionate singer of songs, songs that have enlightened us and moved us to action as citizens of America and the world.”

With her long blonde hair and 5-foot, 10-inch frame, Travers was a striking figure onstage. Strongly influenced by Ronnie Gilbert of the Weavers, she sang in a clear voice full of what her bandmate Noel Paul Stookey called “caged intensity.”

Formed in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1961, the trio — Travers, Stookey and Peter Yarrow — pulled off the rare feat of combining political activism with commercial success. By using smooth harmonies, charisma, humor and a spirit of fun, they were able to deliver serious protest songs to mass audiences.

When they sang at the March on Washington in August 1963, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, Peter, Paul & Mary were the country’s most popular singing group. Their rendition of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” was No. 5 on the Billboard singles charts, after peaking at No. 2, and their first two albums hovered in the top 10.

‘Grab the moment’

“The trio seemed to grab the moment in history, politics and art with a song,” Bruce Eder of the All Music Guide wrote. “The era of public activism over civil rights, directed at the administration of President Kennedy, was rising to new heights, and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ embodied the spirit of the time.”

The trio’s biggest hit came in 1969, when Travers’s lead vocal on John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane” sent that song to No. 1 on the pop charts.

“She always kept the romance alive, whether it was [singing] ‘Jet Plane’ or ‘The Water Is Wide’ or even the poignancy of ‘House of the Rising Sun,’” Stookey told William Ruhlmann of Goldmine magazine in 1996.

Peter, Paul & Mary also protested the Vietnam War, nuclear testing, apartheid politics in South Africa and repression in El Salvador. The trio disbanded in 1970 to pursue separate careers before reuniting in 1978 and remaining together ever since.

“I don’t think we’ve changed very much, certainly not in the intent of our work,” Travers told the New York Times in 2006, the year the group received a lifetime achievement award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame. “The intention has always been to talk about justice, to talk about peace, to talk about equality.”

Baby boomers

In later years, Travers grew into a matronly version of her svelte ‘60s self but still sang with same head-bobbing enthusiasm. Aging baby boomers took their children and grandchildren to the trio’s concerts. Beginning with “Puff the Magic Dragon,” a 1963 hit co-written by Yarrow, almost every album contained a children’s song. “Peter, Paul and Mommy,” a 1969 release, featured 12 songs for kids.

In addition to nearly two dozen Peter, Paul & Mary albums, Travers recorded four of her own.

Mary Allin Travers was born on Nov. 9, 1936, in Louisville, Kentucky, to journalists Robert Travers and Virginia Coigney, who were active organizers for the fledgling Newspaper Guild union. The family moved to Greenwich Village in 1938, where her parents subsequently divorced.

Mary attended The Little Red Schoolhouse, sometimes dubbed “the Little Red Schoolhouse for little Reds” because the private school in Greenwich Village was a haven for Communists and left-wing thinkers. At the affiliated Elisabeth Irwin High School, she joined her classmates in protesting the espionage convictions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

‘A social thing’

“I grew up listening to Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger, believing that inequality was an evil, that women had the right to be anything they want to be and should work,” Travers told the New York Times in 1999. “Singing was a very social thing in the Village. Every Sunday you met up with friends and sat in the park and sang. You went from one group to another.”

In 1955, Travers and three schoolmates were invited to sing in a chorus with Seeger on a set of union songs for the Folkways Records reissue of the 1941 Almanac Singers’ album “Talking Union.” The group, which became known as the Song Swappers, recorded three more albums with Seeger and even appeared twice at Carnegie Hall.

Travers, who left high school in 11th grade, accepted a role as a folk singer in “The Next President,” a Broadway musical starring comedian Mort Sahl, but when the show closed after only 13 performances in 1958, she returned to odd jobs and a marriage that produced her first daughter, Erika, in 1960.

Grossman’s idea

When her marriage broke up, Travers agreed to join a new folk trio that was the brainchild of manager Albert Grossman, who already represented Yarrow and was looking to create a group similar to the Weavers, but with a comic edge.

“I went up to Mary’s apartment and I sang with her,” Yarrow recalled in 2006. “It was OK, but it was incomplete, in the same sense that it’s nice now when the two of us sing, but something magical happens when we add three voices together.”

The third voice, Stookey, was a stand-up comic and musician who worked at the Gaslight Cafe, a nightclub across the street from Travers’s apartment. Stookey used his middle name because Peter, Paul & Mary sounded catchier than Peter, Noel & Mary.

The trio made its formal debut at the Bitter End nightclub, where the singers quickly developed a following and signed a contract with Warner Bros.

Warner released “Lemon Tree” as a single in early 1962, then followed with the trio’s version of “If I Had a Hammer,” written by Seeger and Lee Hays of the Weavers in 1949 to warn against extremism by anti-Communists. “Hammer” won two Grammy awards for the folk group in 1962.

185 weeks

Their eponymous debut album, released in March 1962, sold more than 2 million copies and remained on the charts for 185 weeks.

The following year the trio released two more albums, headlined the prestigious Newport Folk Festival and performed on behalf of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

The trio began singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” — which asks, “How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?” — in early 1963. When the group performed it at the Washington march later that year, it was a transcendent moment, Travers often said.

“If you could imagine the March on Washington with Martin Luther King and singing that song in front of a quarter of a million people, black and white, who believed they could make America more generous and compassionate in a nonviolent way, you begin to know how incredible that belief was,” she said.

In 1963, Travers married Barry Feinstein, a freelance photographer. The marriage produced Travers’ second daughter, Alicia, in 1966, but ended in divorce.

1991 marriage

A 1970s marriage to National Lampoon publisher Gerald Taylor also ended in divorce. For a few years, Travers had a commuter romance with former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben- Veniste in Washington, while raising her daughters in New York.

In 1991, she married restaurateur Ethan Robbins and settled into year-round residence at the Connecticut country home she had owned since the early 1960s.

In addition to her husband, survivors include daughters Erika and Alicia, a sister and two granddaughters.

Source: Bloomberg