Peter Yarrow, a vocalist with the US folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, has died aged 86. The cause was bladder cancer, which Yarrow had been diagnosed with four years ago.
Yarrow took lead vocals on Puff, the Magic Dragon, The Great Mandella and Day Is Done, songs he either wrote or co-wrote with Noel Paul Stookey. Stookey is the last surviving member of the group, as Mary Travers died in 2009.
Stookey told the New York Times that Yarrow was his “creative, irrepressible, spontaneous and musical younger brother” whom he “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. Perhaps Peter was both of the brothers I never had and I shall deeply miss both of him.”
In their 1960s heyday, the group had six US Top 10 singles and one No 1, a cover of John Denver’s Leaving on a Jet Plane, as well as five Top 10 albums.
They were also politically significant. In August 1963, the progressive trio joined the March on Washington and sang a cover of Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which cemented the song’s legacy as an anthem of the civil rights movement.
Yarrow’s songs were often political, telling the story of a war objector on hunger strike in The Great Mandella, from 1967, and suggesting to his son, on Day Is Done, that his generation could make a better world.
In 1970, he was convicted and served three months in prison for “taking indecent liberties with a minor” after a 14-year-old, Barbara Winter, said that when she went to his hotel room in Washington DC in search of an autograph, he answered the door naked and made her touch him until he ejaculated.
Yarrow was granted a presidential pardon by Jimmy Carter the day before Carter’s presidency ended in January 1981. In 2019, Yarrow’s planned performance at the Colorscape Chenango arts festival in New York state was cancelled owing to resurfaced awareness of the conviction.
“I do not seek to minimise or excuse what I have done and I cannot adequately express my apologies and sorrow for the pain and injury I have caused,” he told the New York Times then.
In 2021, Winter said she was not informed of the pardon before reading about it in the press. It felt “like you got sucker-punched in the gut”, she told the Washington Post, which said the pardon was “perhaps the only one in US history wiping away a conviction for a sexual offence against a child”, and noted that it had gone unnoticed at the time, being granted hours before US hostages in Iran were freed.
Yarrow was born on 31 May 1938 to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants who had settled in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated from Cornell University with a degree in psychology in 1959. He began performing during his final year at Cornell, singing in response to lectures given by the folklorist Harold Thompson in his “Romp-n-Stomp” classes.
After graduating, he performed in folk clubs in New York City. On the recommendation of manager Albert Grossman, whom he met after performing at the Newport folk festival in 1960, he met Travers to discuss forming a “Weavers for the baby-boom generation”; Travers suggested Stookey to round out the group.
They gave their first NYC performance in 1961 and signed with Warner Brothers. Their first hit was a cover of If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song) by Pete Seeger, which reached No 10 in the US in 1962. That year they released their self-titled debut album, which spent 10 months in the US Top 10 and two years in the Top 20.
A year later, the trio popularised Blowin’ in the Wind; Dylan was also managed by Grossman. They also released Puff, the Magic Dragon, which became a staple of children’s music – and was not, contrary to popular opinion, about marijuana but a loss of childhood innocence.
Leaving on a Jet Plane was their final US Top 40 hit in 1969. A year later, as a result of Yarrow’s conviction, the group split to pursue solo careers, but reunited in 1972 to support the presidential campaign of the Democratic nominee George McGovern, and in 1978 to protest against nuclear energy, and for a reunion tour. The group reunited for good in 1981. Travers died in 2009 of complications from chemotherapy while being treated for leukaemia.
In Yarrow’s later years, he would also perform with his daughter, Bethany Yarrow, and cellist Rufus Cappadocia, as Peter, Bethany and Rufus. In 2011 he performed with Bethany and his son, Christopher, at an Occupy Wall Street demonstration, performing Puff and We Shall Not Be Moved.
Yarrow continued to support political candidates throughout his life, but often found that his past conviction spurred the opposition to encourage those candidates to distance themselves from his endorsement.
In 1969, Yarrow married Mary Beth McCarthy, a niece of the Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. They divorced but remarried in 2022.
