By John Rogers
Los Angeles: Peter Yarrow, the singer-songwriter best known as one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary, the folk-music trio whose impassioned harmonies transfixed millions as they lifted their voices in favor of civil rights and against war, has died. He was 86.
Yarrow, who co-wrote the group’s most enduring song, Puff the Magic Dragon, died on Tuesday in New York, publicist Ken Sunshine said. Yarrow had bladder cancer for the past four years.
Peter Yarrow performs in New York on July 20, 2014.Credit: AP
“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 said in a statement.
During an incredible run of success spanning the 1960s, Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers released six Billboard Top 10 singles, two No.1 albums and won five Grammys.
In 1969, Yarrow pleaded guilty to taking indecent liberties with a 14-year-old girl who had come to his hotel room with her older sister to ask for autographs. The pair found him naked when he answered the door and let them in. Yarrow, who resumed his career after serving three months in jail, was pardoned by president Jimmy Carter in 1981. Over the decades, he apologised 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 told The New York Times in 2019 after being disinvited from a festival over the sentence.
Mary Travers, Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow perform at a Los Angeles benefit to aid to Cambodian refugees in 1980.Credit: AP
The band had also brought early exposure to Bob Dylan by turning two of his songs, Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right and Blowin’ in the Wind, into Billboard Top 10 hits as they helped lead an American renaissance in folk music. They performed Blowin’ in the Wind at the 1963 March on Washington at which the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr delivered his famous I Have a Dream speech.
Yarrow played roles onstage and offstage at the iconic Newport Folk Festival in 1965 when Dylan went electric. Yarrow was on the festival board and emceed the show, begged Dylan to go back on to play another song after his blistering set, a scene captured in the 2024 biopic A Complete Unknown. Dylan took Yarrow’s acoustic guitar and played It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.
Born May 31, 1938, in New York, Yarrow was raised in a family he said placed high value on art and scholarship. He learnt violin and later switched to guitar, as he came to embrace the work of such folk-music icons as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
Although his university degree was in psychology, he had found his true calling in folk music at Cornell when he worked as a teaching assistant in his senior year for a class in American folklore.
“I did it for the money,” he once said, but soon discovered more. “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 said. “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 manage Dylan, Janis Joplin and others and who at the time was looking to put together a group.
Grossman wanted a trio with a female singer and a member who could be funny enough to keep an audience engaged with comic patter. For the latter, Yarrow suggested a guitar-strumming Greenwich Village comic he’d seen named Noel Stookey.
Stookey, who would use his middle name in the group, was a friend of Travers. Gripped by stage fright, she was reluctant to join the pair at first, changing her mind after she heard how well her contralto voice melded with Yarrow’s tenor and Stookey’s baritone.
Stookey, Travers and Yarrow at the American Music Awards in 1987.Credit: AP
From their earliest albums, the trio sang out against war and injustice.
They could also show a soft side, particularly on Puff the Magic Dragon, which Yarrow had written during his Cornell years with college friend Leonard Lipton.
Some insisted they heard drug references in the song. Yarrow maintained it reflected the loss of childhood innocence and nothing more.
After recording a 1969 cover of John Denver’s Leaving on a Jet Plane, the trio split up, then reunited in 1978 and remained together until Travers’ death in 2009.
As well as his daughter, Yarrow, is survived by his wife Mary Beth McCarthy, son Christopher and a granddaughter, Valentina.
AP
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