Los Angeles: Peter Yarrow, the singer-songwriter best known as one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary, the folk-music trio whose impassioned harmonies transfixed millions as they lifted their voices in favor of civil rights and against war, has died. He was 86.
Yarrow, who co-wrote the group’s most enduring song, Puff the Magic Dragon, died Tuesday in New York, publicist Ken Sunshine said. Yarrow had bladder cancer for the past four years.
Peter Yarrow performs in New York on July 20, 2014.Credit: AP Photo/Kathy Willens
“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,” his daughter Bethany said in a statement.
During an incredible run of success spanning the 1960s, Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers released six Billboard Top 10 singles, two No. 1 albums and won five Grammys.
In 1969, Yarrow had pleaded guilty to taking indecent liberties with a 14-year-old girl who had come to his hotel room with her older sister to ask for autographs. The pair found him naked when he answered the door and let them in. Yarrow, who resumed his career after serving three months in jail, was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1981. Over the decades, he apologised 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 disinvited from a festival over the sentence.
Mary Travers, Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow perform at a Los Angeles benefit to aid to Cambodian refugees in 1980.Credit: AP
The band had also brought early exposure to Bob Dylan by turning two of his songs, Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right and Blowin’ in the Wind, into Billboard Top 10 hits as they helped lead an American renaissance in folk music. They performed Blowin’ in the Wind at the 1963 March on Washington at which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous I Have a Dream speech.
Yarrow played roles onstage and offstage at the iconic Newport Folk Festival in 1965 when Dylan went electric. Yarrow was on the festival board and emceed the show, begged Dylan to go back on to play another song after his blistering set, a scene captured in the 2024 biopic A Complete Unknown. Dylan took Yarrow’s acoustic guitar and played It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.
