Los Angeles — Peter Yarrow, the singer-songwriter best known as one-third of the folk-music trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, has died. His impassioned harmonies transfixed millions as they raised their voices in support of civil rights and against war. He was 86.
Yarrow, who also co-wrote the group’s most iconic song, “Puff the Magic Dragon,” died on Tuesday in New York, according to publicist Ken Sunshine. Yarrow had bladder cancer for the previous four years.
“Our fearless dragon is tired and has entered the final chapter of his magnificent life. “The world knows Peter Yarrow as the iconic folk activist, but the person behind the legend is every bit as generous, creative, passionate, playful, and wise as his lyrics suggest,” his daughter Bethany said in a statement.
Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey, and Mary Travers had an incredible run of success in the 1960s, with six Billboard Top 10 singles, two No. 1 albums, and five Grammy awards.
They also gave Bob Dylan early exposure by turning two of his songs, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” into Billboard Top 10 hits, kicking off an American folk music renaissance.
They performed “Blowin’ in the Wind” during the 1963 March on Washington, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Yarrow appeared both onstage and offstage at the iconic Newport Folk Festival in 1965, when Dylan went electric.
Yarrow, who was on the festival board and emceed the show, begged Dylan to return to play another song after his blistering set, as depicted in the 2024 biopic “A Complete Unknown.”
Dylan took Yarrow’s acoustic guitar and performed “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”
After an eight-year hiatus to pursue solo careers, the trio reunited in 1978 for “Survival Sunday,” an anti-nuclear-power concert organized by Yarrow in Los Angeles.
They remained together until Travers died in 2009. Yarrow and Stookey continued to perform individually and together.
Following their final No. 1 hit, a 1969 cover of John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” the trio split up the following year to pursue solo careers.
That same year, Yarrow pleaded guilty to engaging in indecent behavior with a 14-year-old girl who had come to his hotel room with her older sister to request autographs.
When he answered the door and let them in, they discovered he was naked. President Jimmy Carter pardoned Yarrow, who resumed his career after serving three months in jail, in 1981. Throughout the decades, he apologized repeatedly.
“I 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,” he told The New York Times in 2019, after being barred from attending a festival due to the sentence.
Born on May 31, 1938, in New York, Yarrow grew up in an upper middle-class family that valued art and scholarship.
As a child, he took violin lessons before switching to guitar after becoming inspired by 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 and worked as a struggling Greenwich Village musician before meeting Stookey and Travers.
Although he had a degree in psychology, he discovered his true calling in folk music at Cornell, where he worked as a teaching assistant for an American folklore class his senior year.
“I did it for the money because I wanted to wash dishes less and play guitar more,” he explained to late record company executive Joe Smith.
However, as he led the class in song, he began to realize the emotional impact music could have on an audience.
“I 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,” he recalled.”
“It 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.”
Soon after returning to New York, he met impresario Albert Grossman, who would later manage Dylan, Janis Joplin, and others, and was looking to form a group to rival the Kingston Trio, which had a hit version of the traditional folk ballad “Tom Dooley” in 1958.
Grossman, however, desired a trio with a female singer and a member who could keep an audience entertained with comic patter. For the latter, Yarrow recommended Noel Stookey, a Greenwich Village comic with a guitar.
Stookey, who would join the group under his middle name, was a friend of Travers, who had performed and recorded with Pete Seeger and others as a teenager.
She was initially hesitant to join the pair due to stage fright, but changed her mind after hearing how well her contralto voice complemented Yarrow’s tenor and Stookey’s baritone.
“We called Noel up. “He was there,” Yarrow said, recalling the three’s first performance together. “We mentioned a bunch of folk songs that he didn’t know because he didn’t have a background in folk music, and he ended up singing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’ And it was immediately excellent, as clear as a bell, and we began working.”
After months of rehearsal, the three became an overnight sensation when their first album, 1962’s eponymous “Peter, Paul, and Mary,” debuted at number one on the Billboard chart.
Their second single, “In the Wind,” peaked at number four, and their third single, “Moving,” returned them to number one.
From their earliest albums, the trio sang out 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 own “Day is Done.”
They could also be soft and poignant, especially on “Puff the Magic Dragon,” which Yarrow co-wrote with college friend Leonard Lipton while attending Cornell.
It tells the story of Jackie Paper, a young boy who goes on numerous adventures with his imaginary dragon friend until he outgrows his childhood fantasies and leaves a sobbing, heartbroken Puff behind.
According to Yarrow, “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys.”
Some claimed they heard drug references in the song, a point of contention central to a famous scene in the film “Meet the Parents,” in which Ben Stiller irritates his girlfriend’s tightly wound father (Robert De Niro) by saying “puff” refers to marijuana smoke. Yarrow maintained that it represented the loss of childhood innocence and nothing else.
Yarrow continued to write and co-write songs throughout her career, 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,” which advocates for peace in Lebanon.
Yarrow, who, along with Travers and Stookey, had supported Democratic Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign, met the Minnesota senator’s niece, Mary Beth McCarthy, during a campaign event.
The couple got married the following year. They had two children before getting divorced. They got remarried in 2022.
He is survived by his wife, daughter, son, Christopher, and granddaughter, Valentina.
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