Peter Yarrow — the singer-songwriter greatest often called one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary — died on Tuesday in New York on the age of 86, his publicist stated. Yarrow had bladder most cancers for the previous 4 years.
“Our fearless dragon is drained and has entered the final chapter of his magnificent life,” his daughter Bethany stated in a press release, referring to the group’s most enduring track, Puff the Magic Dragon, which he wrote.
“The world is aware of Peter Yarrow the long-lasting folks activist, however the human being behind the legend is each bit as beneficiant, inventive, passionate, playful, and sensible as his lyrics recommend.”
Throughout an unbelievable run of success spanning the Nineteen Sixties, Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers launched six Billboard High 10 singles and two No. 1 albums, and received 5 Grammys.
In addition they introduced early publicity to Bob Dylan by turning two of his songs, Do not Assume Twice, It is All Proper and Blowin’ within the Wind, into Billboard High 10 hits as they helped lead an American renaissance in folks music.
After an eight-year hiatus to pursue solo careers, the trio reunited in 1978 for Survival Sunday, an anti-nuclear energy live performance that Yarrow had organized in Los Angeles. They’d stay collectively till Travers’s loss of life in 2009.
Born on Might 31, 1938, in New York Metropolis, Yarrow took violin classes as a toddler however later switched to guitar as he got here to embrace the work of such folk-music icons as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
After graduating from Cornell College in 1959, he returned to New York Metropolis, the place he labored as a struggling Greenwich Village musician till connecting with Stookey and Travers.
Though his diploma was in psychology, he had discovered his true calling in folks music at Cornell when he labored as a educating assistant for a category in American folklore throughout his senior 12 months.
“I noticed these younger individuals at Cornell who have been mainly very conservative of their backgrounds opening their hearts up and singing with an emotionality and a priority by means of this automobile referred to as folks music,” he informed the late report firm government Joe Smith. “It gave me a clue that the world was on its method to a sure form of motion, and that people music would possibly play a component in it and that I’d play a component in folks music.”
Quickly after returning to New York, he met impresario Albert Grossman, who would go on to handle Dylan, Janis Joplin and others and who on the time was trying to put collectively a bunch that may rival the Kingston Trio.
However Grossman wished a trio with a feminine singer and a member who may very well be humorous sufficient to maintain an viewers engaged with comedian patter. For the latter, Yarrow prompt a guitar-strumming Greenwich Village comedian he’d seen named Noel Stookey.
Stookey, who would use his center title as a member of the group, occurred to be a buddy of Travers, who as an adolescent had carried out and recorded with Pete Seeger and others. Gripped by stage fright, she was reluctant to affix the pair at first, altering her thoughts after she heard how effectively her contralto voice melded with Yarrow’s tenor and Stookey’s baritone.
“We referred to as Noel up. He was there,” Yarrow stated, recalling the primary time the three carried out collectively. “We talked about a bunch of people songs, which he did not know as a result of he did not have an actual folk-music background, and wound up singing Mary Had a Little Lamb. And it was instantly nice, was simply as clear as a bell, and we began working.”
After months of rehearsal, the three turned an in a single day sensation when their first album, 1962’s eponymous Peter, Paul and Mary, reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart. Their second, Within the Wind, reached No. 4, and their third, Transferring, put them again at No. 1.
Songs of injustice, innocence
From their earliest albums, the trio sang out towards conflict and injustice in songs like Seeger’s If I Had a Hammer, Dylan’s Blowin’ within the Wind and Yarrow’s personal Day is Performed.
They may additionally present a mushy and poignant aspect, significantly on Puff the Magic Dragon, which Yarrow had written throughout his Cornell years with school buddy Leonard Lipton.
It tells the story of Jackie Paper, a younger boy who embarks on numerous adventures together with his make-believe dragon buddy till he outgrows such childhood fantasies and leaves a sobbing, heartbroken Puff behind. As Yarrow explains: “A dragon lives ceaselessly, however not so little boys.”
Some insisted they heard drug references within the track. Yarrow maintained it mirrored the lack of childhood innocence and nothing extra.
After recording their final No. 1 hit, a 1969 cowl of John Denver’s Leaving on a Jet Airplane, the trio cut up up the next 12 months to pursue solo careers.
That very same 12 months, Yarrow had pleaded responsible to taking indecent liberties with a 14-year-old woman who had come to his resort room together with her older sister to ask for autographs. The pair discovered him bare when he answered the door and allow them to in. Yarrow, who resumed his profession after serving three months in jail, was pardoned by then-president Jimmy Carter in 1981. Over the a long time, he apologized repeatedly.
“I absolutely assist the present actions demanding equal rights for all and refusing to permit continued abuse and harm — most significantly of a sexual nature, of which I’m, with nice sorrow, responsible,” he informed the New York Occasions in 2019 after being disinvited from a competition over the sentence.
Through the years, Yarrow continued to jot down and co-write songs, together with the 1976 hit Torn Between Two Lovers for Mary MacGregor. He acquired an Emmy nomination in 1979 for the animated movie 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 marketing campaign occasion. The couple married the next 12 months. They’d two youngsters earlier than divorcing.
Along with his ex-wife and daughter, he’s survived by a son, Christopher, and a granddaughter, Valentina.
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