Peter Yarrow, the singer-songwriter greatest often called one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary, the folk-music trio whose impassioned harmonies transfixed hundreds of thousands as they lifted their voices in favour of civil rights and in opposition to conflict, has died. He was 86.
Yarrow, who additionally co-wrote the group’s most enduring tune, Puff the Magic Dragon, died Tuesday in New York, publicist Ken Sunshine stated. Yarrow had bladder most cancers for the previous 4 years.
“Our fearless dragon is tired and has entered the last chapter of his magnificent life. The world knows Peter Yarrow the iconic folk activist, but the human being behind the legend is every bit as generous, creative, passionate, playful, and wise as his lyrics suggest,” his daughter Bethany stated in an announcement.
During an unbelievable run of success spanning the Sixties, Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers launched six Billboard Top 10 singles, two No. 1 albums and gained 5 Grammys.
They additionally introduced early publicity to Bob Dylan by turning two of his songs, Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right and Blowin’ within the Wind, into Billboard Top 10 hits as they helped lead an American renaissance in folks music. They carried out Blowin’ within the Wind on the 1963 March on Washington at which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his well-known “I Have a Dream” speech.
Yarrow performed roles onstage and offstage on the iconic Newport Folk Festival in 1965 when Dylan went electrical. Yarrow was on the competition board and emceed the present, begged Dylan to return on to play one other tune after his blistering set, a scene captured within the 2024 biopic A Complete Unknown. Dylan took Yarrow’s acoustic guitar and performed It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.
After an eight-year hiatus to pursue solo careers, the trio reunited in 1978 for a “Survival Sunday,” an anti-nuclear-power live performance that Yarrow had organized in Los Angeles. They would stay collectively till Travers’ loss of life in 2009. Yarrow and Stookey continued to carry out each individually and collectively.
After recording their final No. 1 hit, a 1969 cowl of John Denver’s Leaving on a Jet Plane, the trio break up up the next 12 months to pursue solo careers.
That similar 12 months Yarrow had pleaded responsible to taking indecent liberties with a 14-year-old woman who had come to his resort room together with her older sister to ask for autographs. The pair discovered him bare when he answered the door and allow them to in. Yarrow, who resumed his profession after serving three months in jail, was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1981. Over the many years, he apologized repeatedly.
“I fully support the current movements demanding equal rights for all and refusing to allow continued abuse and injury — most particularly of a sexual nature, of which I am, with great sorrow, guilty,” he advised The New York Times in 2019 after being disinvited from a competition over the sentence.
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Born May 31, 1938, in New York, Yarrow was raised in an higher center class household he stated positioned excessive worth on artwork and scholarship. He took violin classes as a baby, later switching to guitar as he got here to embrace the work of such folk-music icons as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
Upon graduating from Cornell University in 1959, he returned to New York, the place he labored as a struggling Greenwich Village musician till connecting with Stookey and Travers. Although his diploma was in psychology, he had discovered his true calling in folks music at Cornell when he labored as a instructing assistant for a category in American folklore his senior 12 months.
“I did it for the money because I wanted to wash dishes less and play guitar more,” he advised the late report firm govt Joe Smith. But as he led the category in tune, he started to find the emotional affect music may have on an viewers.
“I saw these young people at Cornell who were basically very conservative in their backgrounds opening their hearts up and singing with an emotionality and a concern through this vehicle called folk music,” he stated. “It gave me a clue that the world was on its way to a certain kind of movement, and that folk music might play a part in it and that I might play a part in folk music.”
Soon after returning to New York, he met impresario Albert Grossman, who would go on to handle Dylan, Janis Joplin and others and who on the time was trying to put collectively a gaggle that may rival the Kingston Trio, which in 1958 had successful model of the normal folks ballad “Tom Dooley.”
But Grossman wished a trio with a feminine singer and a member who might be humorous sufficient to maintain an viewers engaged with comedian patter. For the latter, Yarrow urged a guitar-strumming Greenwich Village comedian he’d seen named Noel Stookey.
Stookey, who would use his center identify as a member of the group, occurred to be a buddy of Travers, who as a young person had carried out and recorded with Pete Seeger and others. Gripped by stage fright, she was reluctant to affix the pair at first, altering her thoughts after she heard how nicely her contralto voice melded with Yarrow’s tenor and Stookey’s baritone.
“We called Noel up. He was there,” Yarrow stated, recalling the primary time the three carried out collectively. “We mentioned a bunch of folk songs, which he didn’t know because he didn’t have a real folk-music background, and wound up singing Mary Had a Little Lamb. And it was immediately great, was just as clear as a bell, and we started working.”
After months of rehearsal the three turned an in a single day sensation when their first album, 1962’s eponymous Peter, Paul and Mary, reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart. Their second, In the Wind, reached No. 4 and their third, Moving, put them again at No. 1.
From their earliest albums, the trio sang out in opposition to conflict and injustice in songs like Seeger’s If I Had a Hammer and Where Have all of the Flowers Gone, Dylan’s Blowin’ within the Wind and When the Ship Comes In and Yarrow’s personal Day Is Done.
They may additionally present a delicate and poignant facet, significantly on Puff the Magic Dragon, which Yarrow had written throughout his Cornell years with school buddy Leonard Lipton.
It tells the story of Jackie Paper, a younger boy who embarks on numerous adventures along with his make-believe dragon buddy till he outgrows such childhood fantasies and leaves a sobbing, heartbroken Puff behind. As Yarrow explains: “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys.”
Some insisted they heard drug references within the tune, a rivalry on the coronary heart of a well-known scene within the movie Meet the Parents, when Ben Stiller angers his girlfriend’s tightly wound father (Robert De Niro) by saying “puff” refers to marijuana smoke. Yarrow maintained it mirrored the lack of childhood innocence and nothing extra.
Over the years, Yarrow continued to write down and co-write songs, together with the 1976 hit Torn Between Two Lovers for Mary MacGregor. He obtained an Emmy nomination in 1979 for the animated movie Puff the Magic Dragon.
Later songs embrace the civil rights anthem No Easy Walk to Freedom, co-written with Margery Tabankin, and Light One Candle, calling for peace in Lebanon.
Yarrow, who with Travers and Stookey had supported Democratic Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential bid, met the Minnesota senator’s niece, Mary Beth McCarthy, at a marketing campaign occasion. The couple married the next 12 months. They had two youngsters earlier than divorcing. They remarried in 2022.
In addition to his spouse and daughter, he’s survived by a son, Christopher, and a granddaughter, Valentina.
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AP Entertainment Writer Mark Kennedy contributed reporting from New York. Rogers, the principal author of this obituary, retired from The Associated Press in 2021.
