There it was in this mornings paper. My wife pointed it out to me over breakfast. My first reaction was it couldn't be true. Mary was too young! She was 72. In my mind she will always be the pale skinny blond with long straight hair and a voice of beauty that would fill a room. Long before I was a fan of Simon & Garfunkel or Bob Dylan I loved Peter, Paul and Mary. Except for the early days of the Civil Rights movement, I never agreed with them politically but I bought all of their albums. They and the Kingstown Trio were my introduction to folk music. In the last six months I purchased their 2005 "The Very Best of..." album. My favorite album is their first pictured above on top just titled "Peter Paul & Mary." It was released in 1962 and I still have it on vinyl and now on CD. A very sweet album....I just played it a few days ago. I can remember listening to them being interviewed on KGO radio out of San Francisco in the late of night when KGO broadcast from the Hungry i and I was a young kid growing up in Coos Bay/North Bend. When the group broke up in the early 1970's I purchased her first album titled just "Mary." This last summer I downloaded it from amazon.com .My favorite songs from the album is a cover of the John Denver song "Follow Me".I liked the song so much it was sung at our wedding. The Rolling Stone Magazine has a nice obit. Click on the title for a link and enjoy the You Tube video below. I will miss Mary but she left a long catalog of music that will be listened to for a long, long time and that is not a bad legacy. As Bob Hope would say "Thanks for the memories."
In the Summer of 1970 I was in Army Engineer Officer Candidate School at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. It had been a hard week of training and harassment by our TAC Officers and upperclassmen. We were tired, beat up and homesick. Late on a Sunday afternoon while in formation an upperclassman demanded we sing him a song. Our song leader lead us in the singing of "5oo Miles" which we all knew from having heard Peter Paul and Mary sing it on the radio and on vinyl. We were all feeling sorry for ourselves and never has a group sung the song with more feeling.I always think of that point in time, 39 years ago, when I hear that song.
