The band's publicist, Heather Lylis, says Travers died at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut today. She was 72 and had battled leukemia for several years.
Travers joined forces with Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey in the early 1960s.
The trio mingled their music with liberal politics, both onstage and off. Their version of “If I Had a Hammer" became an anthem for racial equality. Other hits included “Lemon Tree," “Leaving on a Jet Plane" and “Puff (The Magic Dragon.)"
They were early champions of Bob Dylan and performed his “Blowin' in the Wind" at the August 1963 March on Washington.
Mary Travers, the clarion-voiced female third of the quintessential folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary whose harmony-laden recordings of politically minded songs by Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger ushered them to the top of the sales charts in the 1960s, died Wednesday after battling leukemia for several years. She was 72.
Travers, who had lived most of her life in a 250-year-old restored Connecticut farmhouse, died at Danbury Hospital, where her mother had been head of public relations for many years.
Travers had been diagnosed with leukemia in 2004, but had undergone a successful bone marrow transplant procedure in 2006 that eradicated the blood disease. She died from side effects of the chemotherapy, her family said.
“In her final months, Mary handled her declining health in the bravest, most generous way imaginable," her longtime musical partner Peter Yarrow wrote in a note posted Wednesday on her website, www.marytravers.com. “She never complained. She avoided expressing her emotional and physical distress, trying not to burden those of us who loved her, especially her wonderfully caring and attentive husband, Ethan. Mary hid whatever pain or fear she might have felt from everyone, clearly so as not to be a burden.
“Her love for me and Noel Paul [Stookey] and for Ethan, poured out with great dignity and without restraint. It was, as Mary always was, honest and completely authentic," Yarrow wrote. “That's the way she sang, too; honestly and with complete authenticity."
Wrote Stookey on the same website: “I am deadened and heartsick beyond words to consider a life without Mary Travers and honored beyond my wildest dreams to have shared her spirit and her career."
Peter, Paul and Mary picked up the folk music torch that the Kingston Trio had ignited in the late 1950s with a string of best-selling albums and brought a more contemporary and socially conscious edge, making Top 10 pop hits out of If I Had a Hammer [The Hammer Song], written the previous decade by Seeger and Lee Hays of the Weavers, and Dylan's Blowin in the Wind. They also gave early boosts to the careers of Gordon Lightfoot and John Denver by recording their songs.
Decades after the trio helped bring Dylans music to the masses, Travers said “Blowin' In the Wind" was the song that still resonated the strongest for her. “Usually the morning paper has one of those questions," she said in a 2006 interview, noting a story in that day's newspaper about nuclear proliferation. “So how many years must the cannonballs fly before they're forever banned?"
Even though Peter, Paul and Mary took socially minded folk music to a commercial pinnacle that has never been repeated, earning the threesome numerous gold and platinum records and five Grammy Awards, Yarrow told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1999, “I think we were a link, and I'm proud of that. But I don't want to overstate our role."
At that time, Travers added: “Peter, Paul & Mary were at the top of the charts in pop music in the '60s when folk music was pop music. That was a blip on the screen. Nobody who sang folk songs then or now is really consumed with the need to be part of pop music."
