Peter Yarrow, singer-songwriter, best known as one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary, the folk-music trio whose fiery tunes captivated millions as they spoke in favor of civil rights and against the war. Campaigner Ken Sunshine, who raised his voice, has passed away. Confirmed by CBS News. Yaro was 86 years old.
Yarrow, who also co-wrote the group's most enduring song, “Puff the Magic Dragon,” died Tuesday in New York, Sunshine told The Associated Press. Yaaro was battling bladder cancer for the last four years.
“Our fearless dragon is tired and has entered the final chapter of his glorious life. The world knows the iconic folk activist Peter Yarrow, but the man behind the legend is every bit as generous, creative, passionate, playful and intelligent .songs suggest,” his daughter Bethany said in a statement.
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During an incredible run of success in the 1960s, Yarrow, Noel Paul Stuckey and mary travers Released six Billboard Top 10 singles, two No. 1 albums and won five Grammys.
He brought Bob Dylan early recognition by having two of his songs, “Don't Think Twice, It's All Right” and “Blowin' in the Wind”, become Billboard top 10 hits, as he helped lead an American renaissance in folk music. Was done. , She performed “Blowin' in the Wind” at the 1963 March on Washington, at which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous speech. “I Have a Dream” Speech,
After an eight-year hiatus to pursue solo careers, the trio reunited in 1978 for “Survival Sunday”, an anti-nuclear power concert that Yarrow organized in Los Angeles. They would remain together until Travers' death in 2009. After his passing, Yarrow and Stookey continued to perform separately and together.
Born in New York on May 31, 1938, Yarrow was raised in an upper middle-class family that valued the arts and scholarship. He took violin lessons as a child, later taking up guitar as he became interested in the work of folk-music icons. Woody Guthrie And Pete Seeger.
Upon graduating from Cornell University in 1959, he returned to New York, where he worked as a struggling Greenwich Village musician until joining Stookey and Travers. Although her degree was in psychology, she found her true calling in folk music at Cornell when she worked as a teaching assistant in a class on American folklore her senior year.
He told the late record company executive Joe Smith, “I did it for the money because I wanted to wash dishes less and play guitar more.” But as he led the song class, he began to realize what an emotional impact music could have on an audience.
He said, “I saw these young people at Cornell who were basically very conservative in their backgrounds and were opening their hearts and singing with emotion and concern through this vehicle called folk music.” “It gave me a signal that the world was on the path to a certain kind of movement, and folk music could play a role in it and I could play a role 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 who at the time were looking to form a group that would rival the Kingston Trio, who had a hit version of the traditional folk ballad “Tom Dooley” in 1958.
But Grossman wanted a trio with a female singer and a member who was funny enough to keep the audience engaged in comic patterns. For the latter, Yarrow suggested a guitar-playing Greenwich Village comic he had seen named Noel Stookey.
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Stookey, who would use his middle name as a member of the group, was a friend of Travers, who had performed and recorded with Seeger and others as a teenager. Suffering from stage fright, she was at first reluctant to join the duo, but when she heard how well her contralto voice matched Yarrow's tenor and Stookey's baritone, she changed her mind.
“We called Noel. He was there,” Yarrow said, recalling the first time the three of them 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 ended up singing 'Mary Had a Little Lamb.' And it was immediately great, just like a bell. It was clear, and we started working.”
When their first album, 1962's “Peter, Paul and Mary,” reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts after months of rehearsals, the trio became an overnight sensation. Their second, “In the Wind”, reached number 4 and their third, “Moving”, brought them back to number 1.
From their early albums, the trio explored war and injustice in songs such as Seeger's “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”, Dylan's “Blowin' in the Wind” and “When the Ship Comes In”. Sang against. And Yarrow's own “day is done.”
They can also show a softer and poignant side, notably on “Puff the Magic Dragon”, which Yarrow wrote with college friend Leonard Lipton during his Cornell years.
It tells the story of a young boy named Jackie Pepper, who goes on countless adventures with his fake dragon friend until he is overtaken by such childhood fantasies and leaves behind a crying, broken heart. The one leaves the puff. As Yarrow explains: “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys.”
With some insisting that they heard drug references in the song, this controversy is at the center of a famous scene from the film “Meet the Parents”, when Ben Stiller visits his girlfriend's seriously injured father (Robert De Niro). Annoys by saying that “puff” refers to marijuana. smoke. Yarrow said that it represents the loss of childhood innocence and nothing more.
After recording their last No. 1 hit, a cover of John Denver's “Leaving on a Jet Plane” in 1969, the trio split up the following year to pursue solo careers.
That same year, Yarrow pleaded guilty to indecent assault on a 14-year-old girl who had come to his hotel room with her older sister asking for an autograph. When they opened the door the couple found her naked and let her inside. Yaro, who resumed his career after three months in prison, was pardoned by the President jimmy carter In 1981. He apologized repeatedly over the decades.
He said, “I fully support the current movements demanding equal rights for all and refuse to allow continued abuse and injury – especially of a sexual nature, of which I am very sadly guilty.” ” told the New York Times In 2019, after being invited to a festival regarding the punishment.
Over the years, Yarrow continued to write and co-write songs, including the 1976 hit “Torn Between Two Lovers” for Mary McGregor. He received an Emmy nomination in 1979 for the animated film “Puff the Magic Dragon.”
Later songs include the civil rights anthem “No Easy Walk to Freedom”, co-written with Margery Tabankin, and “Light One Candle”, which calls for peace in Lebanon.
Yarrow, who along 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 their divorce.
In addition to his ex-wife and daughter, he is survived by a son, Christopher, and a granddaughter, Valentina.