Peter Yarrow — the singer-songwriter best known as one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary — died on Tuesday in New York at the age of 86, his publicist said. Yarrow had bladder cancer for the past four years.
“Our fearless dragon is tired and has entered the last chapter of his magnificent life,” his daughter Bethany said in a statement, referring to the group’s most enduring song, Puff the Magic Dragon, which he wrote.
“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.”
During an incredible run of success spanning the 1960s, Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers released six Billboard Top 10 singles and two No. 1 albums, and won five Grammys.
They 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.
After an eight-year hiatus to pursue solo careers, the trio reunited in 1978 for Survival Sunday, an anti-nuclear power concert that Yarrow had organized in Los Angeles. They would remain together until Travers’s death in 2009.
Born on May 31, 1938, in New York City, Yarrow took violin lessons as a child but later switched to guitar as he came to embrace the work of such folk-music icons as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
After graduating from Cornell University in 1959, he returned to New York City, where he worked as a struggling Greenwich Village musician until connecting with Stookey and Travers.
Although his degree was in psychology, he had found his true calling in folk music at Cornell when he worked as a teaching assistant for a class in American folklore during his senior year.
“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 told the late record company executive Joe Smith. “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 go on to manage Dylan, Janis Joplin and others and who at the time was looking to put together a group that would rival the Kingston Trio.
But Grossman wanted a trio with a female singer and a member who could be funny enough to keep an audience engaged with comic patter. For the latter, Yarrow suggested a guitar-strumming Greenwich Village comic he’d seen named Noel Stookey.
Stookey, who would use his middle name as a member of the group, happened to be a friend of Travers, who as a teenager had performed and recorded with Pete Seeger and others. Gripped by stage fright, she was reluctant to join the pair at first, changing her mind after she heard how well her contralto voice melded with Yarrow’s tenor and Stookey’s baritone.
“We called Noel up. He was there,” Yarrow said, recalling the first time the three performed together. “We mentioned a bunch of folk songs, which he didn’t know because he didn’t have a real folk-music background, and wound up singing Mary Had a Little Lamb. And it was immediately great, was just as clear as a bell, and we started working.”
After months of rehearsal, the three became an overnight sensation when their first album, 1962’s eponymous Peter, Paul and Mary, reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart. Their second, In the Wind, reached No. 4, and their third, Moving, put them back at No. 1.
Songs of injustice, innocence
From their earliest albums, the trio sang out against war and injustice in songs like Seeger’s If I Had a Hammer, Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind and Yarrow’s own Day is Done.
They could also show a soft and poignant side, particularly on Puff the Magic Dragon, which Yarrow had written during his Cornell years with college friend Leonard Lipton.
It tells the tale of Jackie Paper, a young boy who embarks on countless adventures with his make-believe dragon friend until he outgrows such childhood fantasies and leaves a sobbing, heartbroken Puff behind. As Yarrow explains: “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys.”
Some insisted they heard drug references in the song. Yarrow maintained it reflected the loss of childhood innocence and nothing more.
After recording their last 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 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 then-president Jimmy Carter in 1981. Over 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 disinvited from a festival over the sentence.
Over the years, Yarrow continued to write and co-write songs, 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.
Yarrow, who with Travers and Stookey had supported Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential bid, met the Minnesota senator’s niece, Mary Beth McCarthy, at a campaign event. The couple married the following year. They had two children before divorcing.
In addition to his ex-wife and daughter, he is survived by a son, Christopher, and a granddaughter, Valentina.
