Peter Yarrow, the singer-songwriter greatest often known as one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary, the people music trio whose impassioned harmonies transfixed tens of millions as they lifted their voices in favor of civil rights and in opposition to conflict, 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. He 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 people 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 unimaginable run of success spanning the Nineteen Sixties, Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers launched six Billboard Prime 10 singles, two No. 1 albums and gained 5 Grammys.
In addition they introduced early publicity to Bob Dylan by turning two of his songs, “Don’t Suppose Twice, It’s All Proper” and “Blowin’ within the Wind,” into Billboard Prime 10 hits as they helped lead an American renaissance in people 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.
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’d stay collectively till Travers’ demise in 2009. Upon her passing, Yarrow and Stookey continued to carry out each individually and collectively.
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 toddler, later switching to guitar as he got here to embrace the work of such people 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 people 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 file firm govt Joe Smith. However as he led the category in track, he started to find the emotional affect 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 way of this automobile referred to as people music,” he stated. “It gave me a clue that the world was on its solution to a sure sort of motion, and that folks music may play a component in it and that I would play a component in people 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 trying to put collectively a gaggle that may rival the Kingston Trio, which in 1958 had a success model of the standard people 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 recommended a guitar-strumming Greenwich Village comedian he’d seen named Noel Stookey.
Stookey, who would use his center title as a member of the group, occurred to be a pal of Travers, who as a youngster had carried out and recorded with Pete Seeger and others. Gripped by stage fright, she was reluctant to hitch the pair at first, altering her thoughts after she heard how effectively 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 people 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 grew to become 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 conflict 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 Achieved.”
They may additionally present a delicate and poignant aspect, significantly on “Puff the Magic Dragon,” a collaboration between Yarrow and his Cornell pal Lenny Lipton.
It tells the story of Jackie Paper, a boy who embarks on numerous adventures along with his make-believe dragon pal till he outgrows such childhood fantasies and leaves a sobbing, heartbroken Puff behind. As Yarrow explains: “A dragon lives endlessly, however not so little boys.”
At Cornell, Lipton, impressed by a 1936 Ogden Nash poem, “The Story of Custard the Dragon,” had written a poem in 1959 on a typewriter owned by Yarrow, additionally a physics main on the college. Yarrow found the poem within the typewriter and years later used it for the “Puff the Magic Dragon” lyrics.
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 Dad and mom, 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.
After recording their final No. 1 hit, a 1969 cowl of John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Aircraft,” the trio break 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 lady 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 absolutely help 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 Instances in 2019 after being disinvited from a competition over the sentence.
Through the years, Yarrow continued to jot down 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 embody the civil rights anthem “No Simple Stroll to Freedom,” co-written with Margery Tabankin, and “Gentle 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. That they had two kids earlier than divorcing.
Along with his ex-wife and daughter, he’s survived by a son, Christopher, and a granddaughter, Valentina.
Mike Barnes contributed to this report.
