Archie Green (1917–2009) and Mary Travers (1936–2009)

Understanding the history and development of the folk music revival in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s has always been problematic, depending on definitions and interests. The deaths in 2009 of Archie Green and Mary Travers, two prominent and influential folk music personalities, will help to illustrate what might be considered the two poles of the revival—popular and traditional—though the divergences of these strands were not as absolute as some might assume. Green and Travers appeared to have little in common. They were born and raised on opposite sides of the continent. Green, born in 1917 in Winnipeg, Canada, was raised in Los Angeles. Travers, born almost two decades later (1936) in Louisville, Kentucky, grew up in New York City.

Archie grew up in a left-wing, Jewish community, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps, then labored for many years as a shipwright and carpenter. A strong union supporter and New Deal Democrat, while also attracted to the feisty nature of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), he was an early opponent of the Communist Party. An avid record collector, Green was particularly enamored of early hillbilly and other vernacular performers. By the early 1960s he had abandoned the proletarian life to become a librarian at the University of Illinois, where he initiated the Campus Folksong Club, which shunned popular performers in favor of more traditional musicians. With a far-reaching, creative intellect, he obtained a Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania at the age of 52 and quickly published his dissertation as Only A Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal Mining Songs, a pathbreaking study of the intersection between vernacular music and the commercial marketplace. He coined the term laborlore, the study of the music, art, literature, and other expressive aspects of working people. An incredibly productive scholar, he maintained his vocal hostility to popular folk music and the Communist Party and particularly to people such as Pete Seeger who seemed to combine the two.

Mary Travers, on the other hand, came of age in the cultural, political boiling pot of Greenwich Village, and as a teenager was part of the Song Swappers, a musical group including Eric Darling, who accompanied Pete Seeger on two 10″ Folkways albums. In 1961 Travers joined with Noel Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow to form the most successful of the pop folk groups, Peter, Paul and Mary, with dozens of hit singles and albums. Their combination of vocal harmonies and catchy tunes, along with their progressive politics, garnered a huge following at the height of the folk revival and until late in the decade.

While it would appear that Green and Travers would have little, if anything, in common, nonetheless they carried on a warm friendship. Indeed, despite Archie's well known aversion to what he termed corrupted folk music and Stalinist politics, he nonetheless carried on a voluminous correspondence with a wide range of musicians and activists, now housed at the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In late 1963, after a visit to Illinois, Travers assured Green, “I really enjoyed talking to you. You are one of the few people I have met along the way that I hated to leave.” In May 1965, when in New York, Archie called Mary and then, back in Illinois, wrote: “It was great to talk to you today.” Three months later, after returning from the Newport Folk Festival, Travers wrote a fascinating, detailed letter, beginning: “You are a fink! Where were you when the shit hit the fan?… Why was Newport so different this year than last?” And she concluded: “So that was Newport, and I won't go next year—if you don't come. Besides, if it is like this year, I want somebody to document the madness and keep me company and hold my hand.” The last surviving letter, April 1967, from Archie to Mary, somewhat captures their apparently curious relationship: “It was marvelous to learn this morning that Peter, Paul and Mary would be on campus April 28. My recent visit with you was an event of deep meaning.”

The folk music revival was indeed a catchall of various strains of traditional and popular music, seemingly in opposition. Yet there was much overlapping, personally and musically, as the relationship of Archie Green and Mary Travers, both vibrant, influential, and creative personalities, well demonstrates. The tangled career of Paul Nelson (1936–2006) can serve to highlight even more the pitfalls of polarizing the folk revival. Beginning as the undergraduate co-editor (with Jon Pankake) of The Little Sandy Review, the most traditional, anti-commercial, and anti-political of the folk magazines, Nelson soon moved on to work at Sing Out! in the mid-1960s, then became an early reviewer for the rock magazines Circus and Rolling Stone. He wound up producing the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls for Mercury Records and co-writing a biography of Rod Stewart. Nelson's roller-coaster musical career, while certainly peculiar, underscores the need to refrain from having a rigid definition of folk music, or even of popular music, since there has always been much confusion and overlapping. Archie Green and Mary Travers would surely have been in agreement on that score.