Peter Yarrow, one third of the chart-topping 1960s folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary — which helped popularize Bob Dylan as the voice of a generation — co-writer of the song “Puff, the Magic Dragon” and a prominent social activist, died Tuesday morning at his home in New York City “with his family by his side,” a rep confirms to Variety. Yarrow had been battling cancer for four years; he was 86.
Peter, Paul and Mary were a leading light of the booming folk-music scene of the early 1960s, which famously centered around the nightclubs and cafes of New York’s Greenwich Village. Yarrow had begun singing while a student at Cornell University and performed in New York and at the Newport Folk Festival, where he was spotted by manager Albert Grossman, who had a vision of “an updated version of the Weavers,” the legendary folk group featuring Pete Seeger. Singers Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers were soon recruited and, using Stookey’s middle name, Peter, Paul and Mary were born.
The trio signed with Warner Bros. Records and achieved success quickly with their first singles, “The Lemon Tree” and “If I Had a Hammer,” and won two Grammy Awards in 1962. But it was their cover of Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” released in June of 1963, which they performed while standing beside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the historic March on Washington that August, that truly made them into a cultural force, not to mention superstars.
(Not coincidentally, Dylan was also managed by Grossman, Although the new Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown,” does not dramatize how much the trio popularized his music in the early ’60s, Yarrow’s character appears in the film, played by Nick Pupo, seen engaged in debate as a founding member of the board of directors of the Newport Folk Festival.)
The trio would score many hits over the following years — including with the Yarrow-co-written “Puff the Magic Dragon” — yet would remain indelibly associated with those early years. Later in his life Yarrow would focus intensively on social activism and spoke often against the war in Vietnam and on other subjects.
The group’s initial run came to an end in 1970 when they broke up and pursued solo careers. Beyond his own albums, Yarrow had a No. 1 hit as a songwriter with “Torn Between Two Lovers,” recorded by Mary MacGregor, which topped the Hot 100 for two weeks in 1976.
Peter, Paul and Mary first reunited in 1972 to perform at a benefit for George McGovern’s presidential campaign. They came together again in 1978 at an anti-nukes concert. Thereafter, they resumed regular touring and often played dozens of shows a year, which continued until Travers died in 2009.
In an interview for the podcast “The American Radio Show,” Yarrow looked back on the trio’s early success. “The first album that we did had songs on it such as ‘If I Had a Hammer,’ ‘Lemon Tree,’ ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ And that album had quite a lot of success and was up near the top of the charts. The second album had ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ on it. The music had shifted from popular music to music that had become the soundtrack of the consciousness of the change that was going on in America, and our music was a bridge for many people to the music of Bob Dylan, for example.
“‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ was just a kids’ song. But I had no idea it would become so successful. When we sang ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ Bob Dylan was unheard of. He’d recorded a demo of that song, but that was it. The same for ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ by John Denver and ‘In the Early Morning Rain’ by Gordon Lightfoot. We recorded songs based on a different process from that used in commercial music. We recorded songs that really got to us, that moved us, that reached our hearts. The success was a result of that. You can’t reduce the success of the music of the ’60s to a formula involving arrangements and musical presentation. It was a matter of finding the songs, and going to the heart of the songs, and then creating something that we really wanted to share.”
Yarrow was memorialized Tuesday by family and cohorts. His daughter Bethany said: “Our 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. Driven by a deep belief that a more compassionate and respectful world is possible, my father has lived a cause driven life full of love and purpose. He always believed, with his whole heart, that singing together could change the world. Please don’t stop believing in magic dragons. Hope dies when we stop believing, stop caring, and stop singing. He may have been a dyed-in-the-wool progressive, but his passion and music touched people of all ages and political stripes around the world. ”
His longtime bandmate, Noel Paul Stookey (“Paul” of Peter, Paul and Mary), stated: “Being an only child, growing up without siblings, may have afforded me the full attention of my parents, but with the formation of Peter, Paul and Mary, I suddenly had a brother named Peter Yarrow. He was best man at my wedding and I at his. He was a loving ‘uncle’ to my three daughters. And, while his comfort in the city and my love of the country tended to keep us apart geographically, our different perspectives were celebrated often in our friendship and our music. I was five months older than Peter — who became my creative, irrepressible, spontaneous and musical younger brother — yet at the same time, I grew to be grateful for, and to love, the mature-beyond-his-years wisdom and inspiring guidance he shared with me like an older brother. Politically astute and emotionally vulnerable, perhaps Peter was both of the brothers I never had… and I shall deeply miss both of him.”
Yarrow’s legacy was stained by a conviction for taking indecent liberties with a child — a 14-year-old girl — in the late 1970s. The incident reemerged when reporters brought to light that President Jimmy Carter had pardoned Yarrow on the day before Ronald Reagan assumed the office. Wrote the Washington Post in a 2021 article investigating the aftermath, the newspaper wrote that “this pardon by Carter — perhaps the only one in U.S. history wiping away a conviction for a sexual offense against a child — escaped scrutiny when it happened. It was granted just hours before the American hostages in Iran were freed, which captured headlines for weeks. … Yarrow’s crime was mostly forgotten after he served less than three months in jail,” with the rest of his one-to-three-year sentence suspended.
Another woman filed suit in 2021, claiming she had been raped by Yarrow in 1969, when she was a minor. The Post reported that she settled with Yarrow soon thereafter.
Stookey and Yarrow performed shows together as a duo in the late 2010s, up through as recently as last summer. A review of a joint appearance in Minneapolis in 2017 said, “Any concern that I had that the duo would be incomplete without Mary disappeared soon after these two near-octogenarians took the stage. Their two guitars and still near-perfect vocals made for an incredible and passionate evening of music… Those attending expecting only a night of nostalgia with these 1960s protest singers received much more: it was a night of night of reinvigoration for the causes of peace and a better world.” Included in the Peter-and-Paul reunion shows was a new song of Stookey’s called “Work Together,” described as “reject(ing) calls to put the election behind us and work together on the Trump agenda… Always the rebel, Peter Yarrow insisted on taking a knee in protest at the concert – even though pulling it off had the expected level of difficult for a man his age.”
In an April 2024 interview with the Duluth Reader prior to a tour stop there, Yarrow talked about music and its relation to social movements, past and present.
Folk music “still exists, it still has a place,” he said last year, “but it’s a very minor place compared to pop music. And pop music is, to a large degree, a wasteland. It’s not so with certain artists. I mean Lady Gaga has a hell of a conscience; Alicia Keys sings about it and she walks the walk, and so does Taylor Swift, who is a beacon of feminism for teenage girls: Don’t allow the repression that you feel from young men your age to become a reflection of your self-confidence, your essence or self-esteem. Because you are powerful, you are the voice and you can meet them in mutual terrain rather than simply be reactive to the male-dominant culture that we’ve inherited.” Yarrow even likened Swift’s lyrics to “Peter Paul and Mary! Except she isn’t singing to peaceniks, she’s singing to young women who are hopefully not going to allow themselves to be repressed by a male culture of dominance that has brought us to where we are today.”
He continued, “I mean, it is the oppressed people of the world — you know the biblical invocation, ‘the meek shall inherit the earth.’ Look who’s strengthening now — the women. Can you imagine what’s has happened with women with the ‘Pussy March,’ etc. etc. I mean, my God, women are showing up and saying ‘I will not!’ And the oppressed! The LGBTQ showed up and the Black community with Black Lives Matter — the first national gathering of a movement that completely blanketed America where the people, instead of saying ‘where are the people in the streets now that these terrible atrocities have occurred?’ The people were in the streets. And also the students! The students who have been organized…
“We are talking about marginalized people coming into their own. Now, while the Trump reality is growing in its metastatic way, we also have the coalescence of those who have been oppressed to feel their strength. And alas, we don’t have music to accompany that the way we did in the Civil Rights and Vietnam War movements. But nevertheless those movements are in progress.”
Of his recent shows, Yarrow said, “It’s really a remarkable phenomenon because the kind of warmth and enthusiasm and caring, that was once just expected and taken for granted, is reignited amongst people when they sing together, songs like ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ or ‘Leavin’ on a Jet Plane.’ It’s phenomenally moving because it kind of asserts the spirit that bound us together so powerfully so many decades ago and still is in our in our culture and in our hearts and in our DNA. In the era of the animosities of our time, it’s something that’s so restorative to people, so confirmational. No, we’re not gone, no, we still believe in something together. Yes, we still have positive advocacy. Truth, fact, is not a moving target. There are real facts that exist. We have to understand that the dangerous slide of the culture and politics into this polarized, hate-filled perspective is not something that necessarily has to subdue us.”
After Yarrow’s death was announced, his daughter Bethany encouraged donations to her father’s cause: “To honor my father and his legacy In lieu of flowers or any other kind of gift, please consider making a contribution to his not-for-profit, Operation Respect, an anti-bullying program that has been implemented in over 22,000 schools internationally, helping to create the next generation of empathetic, caring, respectful citizens. It would bring him great joy and peace to know that his life’s work of will continue on.”
He is survived by his wife Marybeth, son Christopher, Bethany and granddaughter Valentina.
A memorial service will be announced at a later date.
