Peter Yarrow, who helped make folk music a pop phenomenon in the 1960s as one-third of the vocal trio Peter, Paul and Mary, died Tuesday at his home in New York. He was 86 years old.
His death was confirmed by his publicist, Ken Sunshine, who said the cause was bladder cancer.
Yarrow was the tenor in Peter, Paul and Mary, his tender, attentive voice sandwiched between Noel Paul Stookey's soothing baritone and Mary Travers' airy alto. He co-wrote and sang one of the group's biggest commercial hits, “Puff the Magic Dragon”, which he based on a Leonard Lipton poem and which peaked at No. 2 on Billboard's Hot 100 in 1963.
The song tells the story of a boy and the imaginary playmate whom he eventually leaves behind; For years, many speculated that it was actually smoking marijuana, an interpretation that Yarrow consistently denied. In 1978, CBS aired a popular animated television special based on the song with Burgess Meredith as the voice of Puff.
Among the trio's other well-known tunes were their richly harmonized renditions of Pete Seeger's “If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song),” Bob Dylan's “Blowin' in the Wind,” which they performed at the famous March on Washington, where The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech and John Denver's “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” which topped the Hot 100 in 1969.
They won five Grammy Awards, had two number one albums, and received the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Yarrow's death leaves Stookey as the only surviving member of Peter, Paul and Mary; Travers died in 2009 at age 72.
In a statement, Stookey called Yarrow his “creative, irrepressible, spontaneous and musical younger brother” and said he “came to be grateful and love the mature wisdom beyond his years and the inspiring guidance he shared with me like an older brother.” .
“Politically astute and emotionally vulnerable, Peter was perhaps one of the two brothers I never had… and I will miss them both deeply,” Stookey added.
Like many of their peers in the '60s folk revival scene, Peter, Paul and Mary used their pop success to draw attention to a litany of progressive political causes, including civil rights and fighting the Vietnam War. . However, Yarrow also spent three months in prison in 1970 after pleading guilty to taking “indecent liberties” with a 14-year-old girl after she went to his hotel room to ask for an autograph and he answered the door naked. In 1981, he was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter, who died last month at age 100.
“I do not seek to minimize or excuse what I have done and cannot adequately express my apologies and sorrow for the pain and injury I have caused,” he told the New York Times in 2019 after an arts festival in the North was canceled. of New York State. a performance he had planned to give.
Yarrow was born on May 31, 1938 in New York, the son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. He pursued music while studying psychology at Cornell, and after graduating, he began performing in the folk clubs of Greenwich Village. In 1960, he played at the Newport Folk Festival and met Albert Grossman, the well-connected music impresario, who eventually teamed up with Yarrow, Stookey and Travers to form Peter, Paul and Mary. The trio released their self-titled debut album in 1962; It went on to sell more than 2 million copies.
Peter Yarrow in New York in 2014.
(Kathy Willens/Associated Press)
Peter, Paul and Mary stayed busy for the rest of the decade, releasing more than half a dozen LPs and helping Eugene McCarthy's 1968 presidential campaign; The following year, Yarrow married the candidate's niece, Mary Beth McCarthy, whom he later divorced before remarrying her in 2022, according to the New York Times. Yarrow joined the board of directors of the Newport festival and is said to have been in the sounding board in 1965 when Dylan gave the notorious electric performance depicted at the climax of the new Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown.”
Peter, Paul and Mary broke up shortly after “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and each member pursued a solo career. The trio met in 1972 to support George McGovern's candidacy for the White House; In 1977, Mary MacGregor topped the Hot 100 with “Torn Between Two Lovers,” which Yarrow co-wrote with Phillip Jarrell. Peter, Paul and Mary got back together in 1978 and continued performing and making albums until Travers' death, after which Yarrow and Stookey occasionally played together.
In addition to McCarthy, Yarrow's survivors include his two children and one grandson.
