Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary passed in his New York City home yesterday from bladder cancer. He was 86.
With Noel Paul Stookey and the late Mary Travers, the folk trio won five Grammys, released two number-one albums, and scored six Top 10 hits -- including 1962's “If I Had a Hammer,” their 1963 cover of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and their 1969 version of John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” which topped the charts.
Other well-known songs included "Lemon Tree," "Puff (The Magic Dragon)" and their rendition of Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right."
Yarrow was born in Brooklyn, New York. While attending Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he earned a psychology degree, he first started playing folk music and started teaching a class on the genre there.
He once said, “That’s the real reason I entered the folk field, because in that class I saw the transformational power folk music had. It was a very, very backward time in our country, and certainly on the Ivy League campuses. When the kids at the college took this course, their humanity emerged, and it was palatable and clear. I was in tune with the fact that the world was going to go through a big change and that folk music was going to become an important part of it. It became the soundtrack of that change.”
It was the late Albert Grossman, who went onto manage Bob Dylan, The Band and others, who suggested Yarrow form a folk trio modeled on The Weavers but for a new '60s generation, and that's how Peter, Paul & Mary were born.
Yarrow told Rolling Stone in 2009, “I had a very strong sense of purpose at that time, and Noel and Mary did not. Mary never believed this would go much further than a year or something. Noel also was doing it on a temporary basis. But I had a different concept. Our voices, singing the way we were singing…I felt that we were carrying on a tradition that would be very important in terms of what was happening in the world. I really felt that we had something important to share. It’s like when you fall in love right away and say, ‘I’m going to marry this person!’ That’s what I said in my heart.”
Among their more notable performances were Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington and the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965.
Yarrow told Rolling Stone about the March on Washington, “It was so incredibly powerful, that moment. [It] was a segregated city at that time. Different water fountains for blacks and whites. Here we were in our nation’s capital, where we proclaimed with others that there was liberty and justice for all. Mary later told me, ‘Do you remember when we were standing there listening to the [King] speech? I took your hand, and I said, ‘Peter, we are watching history being made.””
Yarrow unknowingly earned another chapter in music history when he introduced Bob Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, which was his controversial first electric performance.
In 1970, Yarrow was convicted of molesting a 14-year-old girl and was sentenced to one-to-three years in prison, but the judge suspended most of it. He served less than three months, securing an early release on November 25th, 1970 so he could be home for Thanksgiving.
He was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter on the last day of his term, January 19th, 1981.
In 2021, he was accused of raping a female minor in 1969 in his New York City hotel room. The lawsuit was settled out of court.
Yarrow leaves behind two adult children from his marriage to Mary Beth McCarthy who he met while campaigning for 1968 presidential candidate and her uncle, Senator Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota.
Mary Travers of Peter, Paul & Mary died in 2009 from leukemia. She was 72.