Peter Yarrow, the singer-songwriter greatest generally known as one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary, the folk-music trio whose impassioned harmonies transfixed thousands and thousands as they lifted their voices in favour of civil rights and in opposition to warfare, has died. He was 86.
Yarrow, who additionally co-wrote the group’s most enduring track, 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 drained and has entered the final chapter of his magnificent life. The world is aware of Peter Yarrow the enduring folks activist, however the human being behind the legend is each bit as beneficiant, inventive, passionate, playful, and smart as his lyrics recommend,” his daughter Bethany stated in an announcement.
Throughout an unbelievable run of success spanning the Sixties, Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers launched six Billboard High 10 singles, two No. 1 albums and received 5 Grammys.
In addition they introduced early publicity to Bob Dylan by turning two of his songs, Don’t Assume Twice, It’s All Proper and Blowin’ within the Wind, into Billboard High 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 People Competition in 1965 when Dylan went electrical. Yarrow was on the pageant board and emceed the present, begged Dylan to return on to play one other track after his blistering set, a scene captured within the 2024 biopic A Full Unknown. Dylan took Yarrow’s acoustic guitar and performed It’s All Over Now, Child 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 might 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 Aircraft, the trio cut up up the next yr to pursue solo careers.
That very same yr Yarrow had pleaded responsible to taking indecent liberties with a 14-year-old woman who had come to his lodge room along 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 totally assist the present actions demanding equal rights for all and refusing to permit continued abuse and harm — most significantly of a sexual nature, of which I’m, with nice sorrow, responsible,” he informed The New York Occasions in 2019 after being disinvited from a pageant over the sentence.
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Born Could 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 College in 1959, he returned to New York, the place he labored as a struggling Greenwich Village musician till connecting with Stookey and Travers. Though his diploma was in psychology, he had discovered his true calling in folks music at Cornell when he labored as a educating assistant for a category in American folklore his senior yr.
“I did it for the cash as a result of I wished to scrub dishes much less and play guitar extra,” he informed the late document firm government Joe Smith. However as he led the category in track, he started to find the emotional impression music might have on an viewers.
“I noticed these younger folks at Cornell who have been principally very conservative of their backgrounds opening their hearts up and singing with an emotionality and a priority by means of this automobile referred to as folks music,” he stated. “It gave me a clue that the world was on its method to a sure type of motion, and that folks music would possibly play a component in it and that I’d play a component in folks music.”
Quickly 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 seeking to put collectively a bunch that might rival the Kingston Trio, which in 1958 had successful model of the standard folks ballad “Tom Dooley.”
However 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 good friend 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 properly her contralto voice melded with Yarrow’s tenor and Stookey’s baritone.
“We referred to as Noel up. He was there,” Yarrow stated, recalling the primary time the three carried out collectively. “We talked about a bunch of folks songs, which he didn’t know as a result of he didn’t have an actual folk-music background, and wound up singing Mary Had a Little Lamb. And it was instantly nice, was simply as clear as a bell, and we began 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, Within the Wind, reached No. 4 and their third, Shifting, put them again at No. 1.
From their earliest albums, the trio sang out in opposition to warfare and injustice in songs like Seeger’s If I Had a Hammer and The place Have all of the Flowers Gone, Dylan’s Blowin’ within the Wind and When the Ship Comes In and Yarrow’s personal Day Is Accomplished.
They may additionally present a mushy and poignant aspect, significantly on Puff the Magic Dragon, which Yarrow had written throughout his Cornell years with faculty good friend Leonard Lipton.
It tells the story of Jackie Paper, a younger boy who embarks on numerous adventures together with his make-believe dragon good friend till he outgrows such childhood fantasies and leaves a sobbing, heartbroken Puff behind. As Yarrow explains: “A dragon lives perpetually, however not so little boys.”
Some insisted they heard drug references within the track, a competition on the coronary heart of a well-known scene within the movie Meet the Mother and father, 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 time, Yarrow continued to put in writing and co-write songs, together with the 1976 hit Torn Between Two Lovers for Mary MacGregor. He acquired an Emmy nomination in 1979 for the animated movie Puff the Magic Dragon.
Later songs embrace the civil rights anthem No Simple Stroll to Freedom, co-written with Margery Tabankin, and Mild 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 yr. They’d two kids earlier than divorcing. They remarried in 2022.
Along with his spouse and daughter, he’s survived by a son, Christopher, and a granddaughter, Valentina.
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AP Leisure Author Mark Kennedy contributed reporting from New York. Rogers, the principal author of this obituary, retired from The Related Press in 2021.
