Peter Paul and Mary

Peter Paul and Mary

Peter, Paul and Mary made songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” enduring anthems of the 1960s protest movement, died Wednesday night in Danbury Hospital in Connecticut. She was 72 and had lived in Redding, Conn. Ms. Travers brought a powerful voice and an unfeigned urgency to music that resonated with mainstream listeners. With her straight blond hair and willowy figure and two bearded guitar players by her side, she looked exactly like what she was, a Greenwich Villager straight from the clubs and the coffee houses that nourished the folk-music revival. “She was obviously the sex appeal of that group, and that group was the sex appeal of the movement,” said Elijah Wald, a folk-blues musician and a historian of popular music.

Mary Travers, a striking figure of power and glamour in the early-1960s folk music movement, died Wednesday at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut after suffering from leukemia for several years. She was 72. She was best known as the blond with the bangs who commanded the middle microphone with Peter, Paul and Mary, a trio that brought folk music from coffeehouses to top-40 radio. Travers, like Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow, saw folk music both as an art and as an instrument for change. They sang a number of sociopolitical songs, which Travers later defended. "I'm not sure I want to be singing 'Leaving on a Jet Plane' when I'm 75," she said in one interview. "But I know I'll still be singing 'Blowin' in the Wind.' " The trio took considerable criticism from fellow folk singers for developing a sound that some considered too "commercial" and not "authentic" enough. Travers always strongly defended the trio's sound, saying that they were in the folk tradition by making music accessible to everyone, not just academic collectors.