I can’t even explain the level of influence that Mary Travers (of Peter Paul and Mary) had on my life. I can remember hearing Leaving on a Jet Plane for the first time as a small child. I can remember crying through “Cruel War” for the first time. I still sing “If I had a hammer” on loop at full blast.

Peter, Paul And Mary: The Cruel War – Peter, Paul And Mary

It’s not just that I loved this music and that it influenced me as a writer–it’s that, as with most children of hippies, probably, her legend intertwined with the hopes and dreams and lives of a whole generation of mothers and women. And their daughters were left to try to understand the ache of dreams set aside. She was everything and all so many women wanted to be–and for various reasons, including sexism and racism and classism–what they would never be.

Some day, all of us are going to come to the realization–a dream that we had will never be realized. And for many women (I wonder how many of them were women of color), recognizing that their music, their art, was one of those never to be realized dreams…

But even as dreams die, the truth lives on…the moral truth that we all need, even now 40years after the sixties, to figure out and understand our world lives on.

And that is thanks to Mary Travers and the dream she lived and believed in.

~Rest In Peace~