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.<\/p>\n
Yarrow, who also co-wrote the group\u2019s most enduring song, \u201cPuff the Magic Dragon,\u201d died Tuesday in New York, publicist Ken Sunshine said. Yarrow had bladder cancer for the past four years.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur 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,\u201d his daughter Bethany said in a statement.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
They also brought early exposure to Bob Dylan by turning two of his songs, \u201cDon\u2019t Think Twice, It\u2019s All Right\u201d and \u201cBlowin\u2019 in the Wind,\u201d into Billboard Top 10 hits as they helped lead an American renaissance in folk music. They performed \u201cBlowin\u2019 in the Wind\u201d at the 1963 March on Washington at which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech.<\/p>\n
After an eight-year hiatus to pursue solo careers, the trio reunited in 1978 for a \u201cSurvival Sunday,\u201d an anti-nuclear-power concert that Yarrow had organized in Los Angeles. They would remain together until Travers\u2019 death in 2009. Upon her passing, Yarrow and Stookey continued to perform both separately and together.<\/p>\n
Born May 31, 1938, in New York, Yarrow was raised in an upper middle class family he said placed high value on art and scholarship. He took violin lessons as a child, later switching to guitar as he came to embrace the work of such folk-music icons as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.<\/p>\n
Upon graduating from Cornell University in 1959, he returned to New York, where he worked as a struggling Greenwich Village musician until connecting with Stookey and Travers. Although his degree was in psychology, he had found his true calling in folk music at Cornell when he worked as a teaching assistant for a class in American folklore his senior year.<\/p>\n
\u201cI did it for the money because I wanted to wash dishes less and play guitar more,\u201d he told the late record company executive Joe Smith. But as he led the class in song, he began to discover the emotional impact music could have on an audience.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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,\u201d he said. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 that would rival the Kingston Trio, which in 1958 had a hit version of the traditional folk ballad \u201cTom Dooley.\u201d<\/p>\n
But 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\u2019d seen named Noel Stookey.<\/p>\n
Stookey, who would use his middle name as a member of the group, happened to be a friend of Travers, who as a teenager had performed and recorded with Pete Seeger and others. 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\u2019s tenor and Stookey\u2019s baritone.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe called Noel up. He was there,\u201d Yarrow said, recalling the first time the three performed together. \u201cWe mentioned a bunch of folk songs, which he didn\u2019t know because he didn\u2019t have a real folk-music background, and wound up singing \u2018Mary Had a Little Lamb.\u2019 And it was immediately great, was just as clear as a bell, and we started working.\u201d<\/p>\n
After months of rehearsal the three became an overnight sensation when their first album, 1962\u2019s eponymous \u201cPeter, Paul and Mary,\u201d reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart. Their second, \u201cIn the Wind,\u201d reached No. 4 and their third, \u201cMoving,\u201d put them back at No. 1.<\/p>\n
From their earliest albums, the trio sang out against war and injustice in songs like Seeger\u2019s \u201cIf I Had a Hammer\u201d and \u201cWhere Have all the Flowers Gone,\u201d Dylan\u2019s \u201cBlowin\u2019 in the Wind\u201d and \u201cWhen the Ship Comes In\u201d and Yarrow\u2019s own \u201cDay is Done.\u201d<\/p>\n
They could also show a soft and poignant side, particularly on \u201cPuff the Magic Dragon,\u201d which Yarrow had written during his Cornell years with college friend Leonard Lipton.<\/p>\n
It tells the tale of Jackie Paper, a young boy who embarks on countless adventures with his make-believe dragon friend until he outgrows such childhood fantasies and leaves a sobbing, heartbroken Puff behind. As Yarrow explains: \u201cA dragon lives forever, but not so little boys.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some insisted they heard drug references in the song, a contention at the heart of a famous scene in the film \u201cMeet the Parents,\u201d when Ben Stiller angers his girlfriend\u2019s tightly wound father (Robert De Niro) by saying \u201cpuff\u201d refers to marijuana smoke. Yarrow maintained it reflected the loss of childhood innocence and nothing more.<\/p>\n
After recording their last No. 1 hit, a 1969 cover of John Denver\u2019s \u201cLeaving on a Jet Plane,\u201d the trio split up the following year to pursue solo careers.<\/p>\n
That same year Yarrow had 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 apologized repeatedly.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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,\u201d he told The New York Times in 2019 after being disinvited from a festival over the sentence.<\/p>\n
Over the years, Yarrow continued to write and co-write songs, including the 1976 hit \u201cTorn Between Two Lovers\u201d for Mary MacGregor. He received an Emmy nomination in 1979 for the animated film \u201cPuff the Magic Dragon.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later songs include the civil rights anthem \u201cNo Easy Walk to Freedom,\u201d co-written with Margery Tabankin, and \u201cLight One Candle,\u201d calling for peace in Lebanon.<\/p>\n