This news fills me with immense sadness and leaves me feeling everso slightly forlorn. Though I never had the good fortune to meet Mary (or Peter or Paul for that matter) she (and they) has/have been part of my life for most of it - some 47 years! Along with The Weavers, The Carter Family, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, she was among the first folkie voices I heard late at night over the pirate radio stations of the day and singularly, the principle voice that sparked and kept my interest in the folk idiom right up to today!

There have been other great inspirational performers since, many of them English (mostly because I am), but without Mary I might never have heard any of them.
She was so significant in my early personal development as a performer and the awakening and deepening of my passion for the music, I almost feel related.

I can't imagine a world without her voice and, thanks to all the recordings I don't have to endure that, but I (not to mention the world) has clearly lost much more than a great singer - we have all lost a prime example of a top drawer Human Being of extraodinary compassion and commitment to all things promoting the delicate art of living peacefully together on this small planet.

There always seems to be a shortage of her kind, but I hope that the memory of her example will ultimately help to spread the blue-print far and wide and eventually sufficiently subdue the greed and selfishness of the world that she and I have spent a lifetime in abhorrence of.

Mary - thank you so much for your music and everything. R.I.P.