Peter Yarrow, the singer-songwriter and dedicated activist best known as one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary, has died at the age of 86 after a four-year battle with bladder cancer.
As the “Peter” in Peter, Paul and Mary alongside Paul Stookey and Mary Travers, Yarrow had a hand in twelve Billboard Top 40 singles in the early- and mid-1960s including original songs and covers of other folk musicians. Along with Lenny Lipton, Yarrow co-wrote one of the group’s biggest hits, “Puff, the Magic Dragon”, a lasting parable about the bittersweet process of growing out of childhood innocence.
Peter, Paul and Mary – “Puff, the Magic Dragon” (Live, 1965)
[Video: James Guilford]
While music was Yarrow’s medium of choice, the Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee’s message was consistently one of political activism and caring encouragement. He was an active supporter of a range of causes, from Vietnam War opposition to school anti-bullying programs.
As The New York Times noted, “Like many folk groups of the day, Peter, Paul and Mary were as well known for their progressive politics as for their music. In August 1963, they took part in the March on Washington, the site of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Performing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, they sang Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which they had turned into a Top Five Billboard hit that month; their Washington performance helped establish it as a civil rights anthem.”
Yarrow’s life was not without controversy. In 1970, he served three months in prison for taking “improper liberties” with 14-year-old Barbara Winter when she and her sister came to his hotel room seeking an autograph. He was granted a presidential pardon for the conviction by President Jimmy Carter in 1981. Per Rolling Stone, “In his pardon application, Yarrow described his abuse of Winter as ‘the most terrible mistake I have ever made,’ and said he sought the pardon so he would be better able to explain the incident to his children. ‘It is my hope they will see a balanced picture, one that understands that their daddy did something very wrong but also one that asserts that their daddy has also done much for society to eliminate want and inequality where he saw it,’ Yarrow wrote at the time.”
In 2021, he was sued by an anonymous woman sued under New York’s Child Victims Act, which offered victims of child abuse a new window to take legal action against their alleged abusers. As Rolling Stone reported, “The woman claimed that in 1969, while still a minor, she ran away from her home in Minnesota and traveled to New York to meet Yarrow at a hotel, where he raped her. Yarrow allegedly sent her back home with a plane ticket the next morning. (A settlement in the case was reached a few months after it was filed.)”
He later apologized for his behavior during that time, saying, “It was an era of real indiscretion and mistakes by categorically male performers. I was one of them. I got nailed. I was wrong. I’m sorry for it.”
Yarrow’s activism continued well into the 2000s. In 2020, he took part in Live For Live Music‘s Georgia Comes Alive virtual concert to get out the vote, during which he performed Woodie Guthrie‘s “This Land Is Your Land” before shifting the spotlight to three young students of Parkland, FL’s Marjory Stoneman-Douglas High School who had witnessed and survived the deadly school shooting in February 2018.
Following the events of the insurrection on January 6th, 2021, Yarrow released a protest song via Live For Live Music calling for Congress to impeach President Donald Trump. In the song, titled “If More of Us Are Yet to Die“, he sings, “If more of us are yet to die/Whose hands will bloody be/Will we, then still, deny our own/Responsibility?”
Peter Yarrow w/ Parkland Project, S.O.N.G. – Full Segment – Georgia Comes Alive
Rest easy, Peter.