It was to be my first live concert, my first trip to “the city” for an event, and my first exhilarating taste of a “grown-up” social life. Remarkably, my parents agreed I should be allowed to attend with a friend. In a bit of good fortune so unexpected it seemed impossible, the news appeared one day in the Des Moines Register: Peter, Paul and Mary were coming to town for a concert at the KRNT Theater. I bought a second album, and then a third. The trio quickly became a sensation, and my love for their music continued to grow. Later, the cautionary tone of the first track on their first album began to resonate in a new way, rendered sharper and more pointed by circumstance. Their music sounded “nice”, making it easy for parents unsure about Elvis, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis to smile approvingly while we listened, even as we wondered what it was about the music that stirred us so profoundly. Later generations might learn to moonwalk or play air guitar in their basements and bedrooms, but high schoolers of the ’60s learned to harmonize.īest of all, Peter, Paul and Mary weren’t rock’n’roll. It was one of the first albums I purchased for myself, and within weeks I’d memorized each of its songs. Their 1962 debut album, Peter, Paul & Mary, contained two of their biggest hits, Lemon Tree and the multiple Grammy Award-winning If I Had a Hammer. Herb Caen, celebrated columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, might have been envisioning the lanky blond and goateed guitarists when he coined his term “beatnik” in a 1958 column. When she joined Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey in the early 1960s to begin making music in Greenwich Village, the trio caught on immediately, sweeping into our 1950s lives with an irresistable combination of intensity and cool. Her struggles with leukemia have been well documented, and her death at a Danbury, Connecticut hospital at the age of 72 was the natural outcome of a long process. When I learned Mary Travers had died, I wasn’t surprised. Now and then, the grief is more personal. More often we become nostalgic or nervous, aware that the passing of this stranger is a marker of sorts, a memento mori, a reminder that our years, too, are passing and the fate of others is our own. As if amazed that wealth and fame present no obstacle to the predations of time, we stand arrested, staring in puzzlement as the lives of those we imagined to be immortal begin to fade against the horizon of history. Honored, recognized, hidden or charicatured, the death of celebrity fascinates us.
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