Robin Williams once accurately quipped that if you remember the 60’s–you weren’t there. Erratic, sultry, heated, even confusing were the times then. It is a theme I have written much on and more seems to flow from my pen as I contemplate the death of Mary Travers this morning. She was a real artist. When I was so impressionable she sang and my heart and soul heard. Even now, as I labor at becoming a legitimate guitar player in my own right, chief among my developing songlist are songs by her, by Peter, Paul, and Mary Travers. I didn’t know her but I identified with her. Greenwich Village, coffeehouses, the folk revival of the 1960’s. I was there. I called Coy Lowe and asked him for cords to songs after visiting the head shops, smelling the incense, and seeing the black light posters and “gear” of the times. I haven’t seen or heard from Coy Lowe in some 35 years or so. I doubt I will ever speak with him again. Maybe …. He was there too.
Those times were haunting really. Grace Slick speaks about it as chasing ghosts and, of course, this is so insofar as catching any of them is impossible. They are faint images and feelings,a glow or an impulse, and a glimmer–and then its gone in a wisp of time, forever swirling as a memory attached to a feeling. We were wrong then and history has proved it. But what we wanted then was just and true and while not in every instance we desired justice and truth and righteousness. Druggery was clearly not the way to get there for that is a pact with the Devil. Everyone who was “there” has learned that or they’re likely dead by now.
Mary Travers was 72. I wished she could have stayed with us as the Greenwich Villager she was even forever. Psalm 37:29 promises that one day this will come true. In the interim, we die. Folk Music has lost a genuine artist. The music of Mary Travers will take on even an increased urgency with me for the rest of mine.
I pray her family finds comfort in these difficult times.
So long, Mary Travers. And … THANKS~!
