Peter Yarrow, who helped create folk music a music happening in the 1960s as one-third of the vocal group Peter, Paul and Mary, died Tuesday at his home in New York. He was 86.
His death was confirmed by his writer, Ken Sunshine, who said the reason was bladder cancer.
Yarrow’s sweet and diligent singers were sandwiched between the airy baritone of Mary Travers and the soothing bass of Noel Paul Stookey in Peter, Paul and Mary. He co-wrote and sang the prospect for” Puff the Magic Dragon,” one of the team’s biggest business successes, based on a song by Leonard Lipton, which reached No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1963.
Many people speculated that the song was actually about smoking marijuana, a theory that Yarrow regularly refuted, and the fictional playmate the young boy gradually overdoses on. A well-known active TV special starring Burgess Meredith as Puff’s speech was aired on CBS in 1978.
Among the couple’s other well-known sounds were their cleverly integrated versions of Pete Seeger’s” If I Had a Hammer ( The Hammer Song )”, Bob Dylan’s” Blowin’ in the Wind”— which they performed at the popular March on Washington where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his” I Have a Dream” conversation— and John Denver’s” Leaving on a Jet Plane”, which topped the Hot 100 in 1969.
They won five Grammy Awards, scored two No. The Songwriters Hall of Fame awarded Sammy Cahn the Lifetime Achievement Award for his 1 album.
Yarrow’s death leaves Stookey as the only surviving member of Peter, Paul and Mary,  , Travers died , in 2009 at 72.
In a statement, Stookey called Yarrow his” creative, irresistible, unexpected and artistic younger sibling” and said he “grew to be grateful for, and to love, the mature-beyond-his-years wisdom and inspiring assistance he shared with me like an older sibling”.
” Politically astute and emotionally vulnerable, perhaps Peter was both of the brothers I never had … and I shall deeply miss both of him”, Stookey added.
Peter, Paul and Mary used their pop success to draw attention to a litany of progressive political causes, including civil rights and the fight against the Vietnam War, like many of their peers in the ’60s folk-revival scene. In 1970, Et Yarrow admitted to taking “indecent liberties” with a 14-year-old girl after she had asked him to sign autographs and he had walked out of the door. He also admitted to doing so for three months in jail. In 1981, he was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter, who , died last month , at 100.
After an arts festival in upstate New York called off a performance he’d been scheduled to give, he told The New York Times in 2019 that he “do not seek to minimize or excuse what I have done and I cannot adequately express my apologies and sorrow for the pain and injury I have caused.”
Yarrow was born May 31, 1938, in New York, the son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. He began playing music while attending Cornell to study psychology, and afterward he began playing in Greenwich Village’s folk clubs. In 1960, he played the Newport Folk Festival and met Albert Grossman, the well-connected music impresario, who eventually teamed Yarrow with Stookey and Travers to form Peter, Paul and Mary. The trio’s self-titled debut album, which sold more than 2 million copies, was released in 1962.
Peter, Paul and Mary stayed busy through the rest of the decade, issuing more than half a dozen LPs and assisting Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign in 1968, the next 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 reportedly joined the Newport festival’s board in 1965 when Dylan gave the notoriously electric performance that was featured at the climax of the new Dylan biopic” A Complete Unknown” ( A Complete Unknown ).
Peter, Paul and Mary broke up not long after” Leaving on a Jet Plane”, and each member went on to a solo career. The trio reunited in 1972 to support George McGovern’s bid 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 reconnected in 1978, and they continued to perform and release albums until Travers passed away, when Yarrow and Stookey occasionally collaborated.
In addition to McCarthy, Yarrow’s survivors include their two children and a grandchild.
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