Peter Yarrow, who has died aged 86 of bladder cancer, was a member of the highly successful American folk song trio Peter, Paul and Mary. With their fine harmony singing, polished stage performances and social and political commitment, they crossed over from the New York City folk revival in Greenwich Village to international pop music success.
Yarrow wrote some of the group’s tracks, including their best known song, Puff, the Magic Dragon, based on a poem by Leonard Lipton. The trio also popularised Bob Dylan’s early songs, in particular Blowin’ in the Wind; their 1963 recording reached No 2 in the US charts and entered the UK Top 20.
The trio split up for a period in 1970, the same year that Yarrow was convicted of sexually molesting a 14-year-old girl who had come to his dressing room with her elder sister to ask for an autograph. He served three months in prison. In 1981, he received a presidential pardon from Jimmy Carter on his last day in office.
Greenwich Village was a cultural hub in the 1950s and 60s. Nightclubs and coffee bars hosted young, politicised folk musicians, including Yarrow. At the 1960 Newport folk festival, he met the music impresario Albert Grossman, who became his manager. Grossman recruited Yarrow for his plan of a singing group that would perform folk and modern songs with a political message. Grossman’s role models were the Weavers, which featured Pete Seeger, and the all-male Kingston Trio; his vision was a trio featuring a female singer.
Grossman and Yarrow identified Mary Travers as a potential member, and she suggested the stand-up comedian Noel Stookey, whose middle name was Paul. As Peter, Paul and Mary, the trio rehearsed intensively under the direction of the musical arranger Milt Okun for six months before their first performances. Okun and Grossman also developed their stagecraft: Yarrow and Stookey sporting goatee beards and suits, and playing their guitars standing either side of Travers. Yarrow introduced the serious songs, Stookey the funny ones, while Travers said nothing, to enhance her mystique as an American Brigitte Bardot.
They were an immediate success at their New York debut at The Bitter End club in 1961, and quickly signed to Warner Brothers, who released two singles: Lemon Tree, then If I Had a Hammer, which won two Grammy awards in 1962. Their eponymous first album remained in the US Top 10 for 10 months, selling more than 2m copies.
Their second album, Moving, was released in early 1963 and included Puff, the Magic Dragon. The song, reportedly about the loss of childhood innocence and not, as sometimes suggested, drug use, enjoyed chart success when released as a single and was also the basis of three animated television films, which earned Yarrow an Emmy nomination.
Blowin’ in the Wind was one of three Dylan songs on Peter, Paul and Mary’s third album, In the Wind, released in October 1963; it had previously been issued as a single in June that year. Dylan was also managed by Grossman, but at the time was still at the beginning of his career, and the trio did much to bring him to a wider audience. They also recorded Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right: both songs were on Dylan’s Freewheelin’ album, released in May 1963.
In the summer of 1963, Peter, Paul and Mary performed at the Newport folk festival, then linked arms with Dylan, Joan Baez, Seeger and the Freedom Singers to sing We Shall Overcome. The following month, Peter, Paul and Mary sang Blowin’ in the Wind in front of a quarter of a million people at the March on Washington, when Martin Luther King gave his famous “I have a dream” speech. The song became a civil rights anthem and then a peace anthem when they sang it at anti-Vietnam war protests, including the 1969 protest in Washington that Yarrow helped to organise.
Further albums followed with a mix of folk and gospel songs, as well as new songs by Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot and Laura Nyro, and those composed by Yarrow and Stookey. John Denver’s Leaving on a Jet Plane was recorded on their Album 1700 in 1967, then became a US No 1 when released as a single in 1969, reaching No 2 in the UK.
Following Yarrow’s conviction, the trio pursued solo careers. Yarrow released several solo albums, the first, entitled Peter, in 1972. He also co-wrote Torn Between Two Lovers, which was a hit for Mary MacGregor in both the US and the UK.
He continued to be active in civil rights, and was instrumental in establishing Operation Respect, to combat school bullying. He also campaigned to free Soviet Jews and wrote Light One Candle as a response to the 1982 Lebanon war.
Born in New York, Peter was the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, Bernard Yarrow, who changed the family name from Yaroshevitz, a lawyer who became assistant district attorney in New York, and Vera (nee Burtakov), a drama teacher. They divorced when Peter was five. Peter went to what is now LaGuardia high school in Manhattan, then studied psychology at Cornell University, graduating in 1959.
After several reunion concerts, including one in support of George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, Peter, Paul and Mary formally reunited in 1981 and made several more albums, including No Easy Walk to Freedom (1986): the title track was co-written by Yarrow for Nelson Mandela, who was then still imprisoned. They continued performing until Travers’s death in 2009. By then, Yarrow was also singing with his daughter, Bethany, and the cellist Rufus Cappadocia, with whom he recorded an album Puff and Other Family Classics (2008), as well as continuing to sing with Stookey as a duo.
Yarrow was an intense and serious performer, with a great ability to encourage the audience to sing along in the choruses, a knack he learned from Seeger. In 2014, Yarrow and Stookey published Peter, Paul and Mary: Fifty Years in Music and Life, with a foreword by John Kerry, then the US secretary of state.
Yarrow met Mary Beth McCarthy in 1968, while campaigning for Eugene McCarthy in the presidential election: she was McCarthy’s niece. They married the following year, then later divorced; in 2022 they remarried.
She survives him as do his two children, Christopher and Bethany, and a granddaughter, Valentina.
Source: theguardian.com
