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Thursday, September 17, 2009

and mary

Ms. Travers, onstage, drew all eyes as she shook her hair, bobbed her head in time to the music and clenched a fist when the lyrics took a dramatic turn. On instructions from Grossman, who wanted her to retain an air of mystery, she never spoke. NY Times




(Grew up with this record of course. Lemon Treesy listening, as sisters sang passionately about hammers and I stared at this record cover imagining adult blondeness and goateed guitarists)
 

8 comments:

iODyne said...

PP&M were huge indeed.
My grandmother had the sheet music of Puff The Magic Dragon and played it merrily for all her grandchildren, oblivious as we all were.
Melbourne of course, had our own blonde sweetheart in Judy Jaques who must have been mighty peeved to have this NYC doppelganger steal her schtick.
AlbertGrossman could have managed the Devil himself to win a popularity contest.
RIP and Mary.

genevieve said...

oh SAD. Saw them perform in about 1981 here. Beautifully blended: and she was allowed to speak by that stage, claiming (somewhat extravagantly, I thought) to have learned "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child" from Paul Robeson.
(See, I just thought everybody knew that song anyway. But now I feel a bit mean.)

boynton said...

Judy Jacques and Judith D (not blonde but one of the world's most distinctive voices.)

also from that NY times obit:
“She had a kind of sexual confidence combined with intelligence, edginess and social consciousness — a potent combination,” he said. “If you look at clips of their performances, the camera fixates on her. The act was all about Mary.”

On my post I edited/mangled that commentary down to a couple of bad lines, edited because there was some family stuff that seemed too trite and sentimental yesterday, but that record (and its cover) is one of the touchstones of late 60s childhood. As a little girl I thought Mary was beautiful. So it is. SAD.

BwcaBrownie said...

true true.

I met JD twice - in 1972 and in 1995 and I can attest that she is a genuinely nice person, not at all puffed by her own CV (and is very small).

In 1963 all teen girls were doomed to replicate their mother exactly; then we saw Francoise Hardy, and Jean Shrimpton and Mary Travers and realised there were OPTIONS.
Following them led to
1. school "we will have no hang-dog hairstyles here thank you - tie that hair off your face"

2. home: "you cannot sit at the table with that hair in your face"
etc
(so we knew we were
OnTo Something Threatening)

Helen said...

I was a Seekers child - it was like the Beatles and the Stones ay! Nylon string acoustics at 50 paces!

I LOL'd at the reference to "500 Miles" on the post you linked to, because I had a car full of little boys yelling along to the other 500 miles song the other day- the scottish one - SO NOT "wistful" that one! :-D

boynton said...

There were OPTIONS
sounds like the name of a history book to sit alongside another of the school texts:
There was Man...


False binary syndrome? ;) I was a seekers child too (still am I think - one of my fave DVDs is "The Seekers At Home and Down Under")

I remember thinking of the wistful one when the scottish one first emerged.

a thousand shades of twilight said...

Peter Paul and Mary were my first love. And Mary was the best. I love the way she shook her head and stamped, a bit like a horse. I sometimes watch clips of them when I've had a few and send them to all my friends.

boynton said...

yea/neigh verily ;)

Nice to see you, thou/sand.

Also, in general, I realise that I did not post a clip from The Seekers Down Under to qualify the comment above and to illustrate its magnificence. I hope to do that after deleting all the sp*m anon anon.