LOS ANGELES (AP) — One third of Peter, Paul and Mary, the folk music trio whose passionate harmonies captivated millions as they spoke out in favor of civil rights and against war. Peter Yarrow is a singer-songwriter best known as Peter Yarrow. Died. He was 86 years old.
Mr. Yarrow, who also co-wrote the group's most enduring song, “Puff the Magic Dragon,” died Tuesday in New York, publicist Ken Sunshine said. Yarrow had been suffering from bladder cancer for the past four years.
“Our fearless dragon is exhausted and entering the final chapter of his epic life. Peter Yarrow is known to the world as an iconic folk activist, but behind this legend Human beings are every bit as generous, creative, passionate, playful and smart as his lyrics show,” his daughter Bethany said in a statement.
During their incredible success throughout the 1960s, Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey, and Mary Travers released six Billboard Top 10 singles, two No. 1 albums, and won five Grammy Awards. was awarded.
They also made two of Bob Dylan's songs, “Don't Think Twice, It's All Right” and “Blowin' in the Wind” Billboard Top 10 hits, and helped lead a renaissance in American folk music. made its existence known in the early days. . They performed “Blowin' in the Wind” at the 1963 March on Washington, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
After an eight-year hiatus to pursue a solo career, the trio reunited in 1978 for Survival Sunday, an anti-nuclear concert organized by Yarrow in Los Angeles. They remained together until Travers' death in 2009. After Travers' death, Yarrow and Stookey continued to perform separately and together.
Born in New York on May 31, 1938, Yarrow grew up in a middle-class family that valued the arts and learning. He took violin lessons as a child, but later turned to guitar as he embraced the work of folk music icons such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
After graduating from Cornell University in 1959, he returned to New York and worked as a struggling musician in Greenwich Village until hooking up with Stookey and Travers. Although his degree was in psychology, he found his calling in folk music while working as a teaching assistant for an American Folklore class at Cornell University.
“I did it for the money because I wanted to wash less dishes and play more guitar,” he told the late record executive Joe Smith. However, as I taught singing classes, I began to discover the emotional impact music had on audiences.
“I've seen young people at Cornell who come from basically very conservative backgrounds open up and sing with emotion and compassion through the medium of folk music,” he said. Ta. “It gave me a hint that the world was moving toward some kind of movement, and that folk music might be a part of that, and that I might be a part of it.” He gave it to me.”
Upon returning to New York, he met Albert Grossman, an impresario who would go on to manage the likes of Dylan and Janis Joplin, and at the time he formed a group to rival the Kingston Trio's 1958 hit. I was trying. A version of the traditional folk ballad “Tom Dooley”.
But Grossman wanted a trio with a female singer and someone funny enough to keep the audience engaged with the comical twists. For the latter, Yarrow suggested a guitar-strumming Greenwich Village cartoon he had seen named Noel Stookey.
Stookey, who would go by his middle name as a member of the group, happened to be a friend of Travers's, and had performed and recorded with Pete Seeger and others as a teenager. Suffering from stage fright, she was initially reluctant to join the pair, but changed her mind after hearing how well her contralto voice blended with Yarrow's tenor and Stookey's baritone.
“I called Noel, and he was there,” Yarrow said, recalling the first time the three played together. “We talked about a lot of folk songs, which he didn't know about because he didn't have a real folk music background, but he ended up singing 'Mary's Lamb.' I sang. And it immediately became great and clear as a bell and we started working. ”
After months of rehearsals, the trio became an overnight sensation when their eponymous first album, 1962's Peter, Paul, Mary, reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts. The second song “In the Wind” reached number 4, and the third song “Moving” returned to number one.
From their early albums, the trio performed songs such as Seeger's “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have the Flowers Gone?” and Dylan's “Blowin' in the Wind” and “When the Ships Come in.” In his songs, he has spoken out against war and injustice. and Yarrow's own “Day is Done.”
He was also able to show a softer, more poignant side, especially in “Puff the Magic Dragon,'' which Yarrow wrote with his college friend Leonard Lipton while at Cornell University.
In addition to his daughter Bethany, he is survived by his wife Mary Beth, son Christopher, and granddaughter Valentina.
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AP Entertainment Writer Mark Kennedy contributed reporting from New York. Rogers, the lead author of this obituary, retired from The Associated Press in 2021.
