Peter Yarrow of folk music trio Peter, Paul and Mary dies at 86

LOS ANGELES– Peter Yarrow, the singer-songwriter best known as one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary, the folk music trio whose passionate harmonies transfixed millions as they raised their voices for civil rights and against the war, died. He was 86 years old.

Yarrow, who also co-wrote the group’s most memorable song, “Puff the Magic Dragon,” died Tuesday in New York, publicist Ken Sunshine said. Yarrow had suffered from bladder cancer for four years.

“Our fearless dragon is tired and has entered the final chapter of his magnificent life. The world knows Peter Yarrow, the iconic folk activist, but the human being behind the legend is just as generous, creative, passionate, playful and wise that the 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.

They also introduced Bob Dylan early by turning two of his songs, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” into Top 10 Billboard hits, helping lead a renaissance American folk music. . They performed “Blowin’ in the Wind” during the 1963 March on Washington during which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

After an eight-year hiatus to pursue solo careers, the trio reunited in 1978 for “Survival Sunday,” an anti-nuclear concert organized by Yarrow in Los Angeles. They would remain together until Travers’ death in 2009. After his death, Yarrow and Stookey continued to perform separately and together.

Born May 31, 1938, in New York, Yarrow grew up in an upper-middle-class family that he said placed a high value on art and scholarship. He took violin lessons as a child, then turned to guitar as he came to embrace the work of folk music icons such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.

After graduating from Cornell University in 1959, he returned to New York, where he worked as a struggling musician in Greenwich Village until he connected with Stookey and Travers. Although a psychology major, he had found his true calling in folk music at Cornell when he worked as a teaching assistant in an American folklore course during his senior year.

“I did it for the money because I wanted to do dishes less and play guitar more,” he told the late record company executive Joe Smith. But while leading the voice class, he began to discover the emotional impact music could have on an audience.

“I saw these young people at Cornell who were basically very conservative in their background, opening their hearts and singing with emotionality and concern through this vehicle called folk music,” he said. “It gave me the idea that the world was on its way to a certain type of movement, that folk music could play a role in it, and that I could play a role in folk music.”

Shortly 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 that would rival the Kingston Trio, who in 1958 was a success. version of the traditional folk ballad “Tom Dooley”.

But Grossman wanted a trio with a singer and a member who could be funny enough to keep the audience engaged with comedic patter. For the latter, Yarrow suggested a guitar-playing Greenwich Village cartoon he had seen, named Noel Stookey.

Stookey, who would use his middle name as a band member, happened to be a friend of Travers, who as a teenager had played and recorded with Pete Seeger and others. Gripped by stage fright, she was reluctant to join the duo at first, changing her mind after hearing how well her contralto voice blended with Yarrow’s tenor and Stookey’s baritone.

“We called Noel. He was there,” Yarrow said, remembering the first time the three played together. “We mentioned a bunch of folk songs, which he didn’t know because he didn’t have any real folk music training, and we ended up singing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’” And that was it. straight away great, it was as clear as a bell, and we started working.”

After months of rehearsal, the three became an overnight sensation when their debut album, 1962’s self-titled “Peter, Paul and Mary,” reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts. Their second, “In the Wind”, reached #4 and their third, “Moving”, put them back at #1.

From their earliest albums, the trio sang against war and injustice in songs like Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have all the Flowers Gone,” Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and ” When the Ship Comes In.” and Yarrow’s “Day is Done.”

They could also show a gentle, poignant side, notably on “Puff the Magic Dragon,” which Yarrow had written during his years at Cornell with his college friend Leonard Lipton.

It tells the story of Jackie Paper, a young boy who embarks on countless adventures with his imaginary dragon friend until he outgrows these childhood fantasies and leaves behind a sobbing and austere Puff. broken heart. As Yarrow explains: “A dragon lives forever, but little boys don’t. »

Some insisted they heard drug references in the song, a controversy at the heart of a famous scene in the movie “Meet the Parents,” when Ben Stiller angers his girlfriend’s father ( Robert De Niro), very hurt, saying that “puff” refers to marijuana. smoke. Yarrow argued that this reflected the loss of childhood innocence and nothing more.

After recording their last No. 1 hit, a cover of John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane” in 1969, the trio broke up the following year to pursue solo careers.

That same year, Yarrow pleaded guilty to taking indecent liberties with a 14-year-old girl who came to his hotel room with her older sister to ask for autographs. The two men found him naked when he opened the door and let them inside. Yarrow, who returned to his career after serving three months in prison, was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1981. Over the decades, he apologized repeatedly.

“I fully support current movements demanding equal rights for all and refusing to allow abuse and harm to continue – especially of a sexual nature, of which I am, with great sadness, guilty,” he said. he told the New York Times in 2019 after being charged. disinvited from a festival because of the sentence.

Over the years, Yarrow continued to write and co-write songs, including the 1976 hit “Torn Between Two Lovers” for Mary MacGregor. He received an Emmy nomination in 1979 for the animated film “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

Later songs include 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 along with Travers and Stookey had supported Democratic Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s presidential bid in 1968, met the Minnesota senator’s niece, Mary Beth McCarthy, at a campaign event. The couple married the following year. They had two children before divorcing.

In addition to his ex-wife and daughter, he is 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 primary writer of this obituary, retired from The Associated Press in 2021.