Peter Yarrow, the singer-songwriter greatest often known as one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary, the folk-music trio whose impassioned harmonies transfixed tens of millions as they lifted their voices in favor of civil rights and towards struggle, has died, publicist Ken Sunshine confirmed to CBS News. Yarrow was 86.
Yarrow, who additionally co-wrote the group’s most enduring tune, “Puff the Magic Dragon,” died Tuesday in New York, Sunshine advised the Associated Press. Yarrow had been battling bladder most cancers for the previous 4 years.
“Our fearless dragon is drained and has entered the final chapter of his magnificent life. The world is aware of Peter Yarrow the enduring people activist, however the human being behind the legend is each bit as beneficiant, inventive, passionate, playful, and smart as his lyrics recommend,” his daughter Bethany mentioned in an announcement.
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During an unbelievable run of success spanning the Sixties, Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers launched six Billboard Top 10 singles, two No. 1 albums and received 5 Grammys.
They additionally introduced early publicity to Bob Dylan by turning two of his songs, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Blowin’ within the Wind,” into Billboard Top 10 hits as they helped lead an American renaissance in people music. They carried out “Blowin’ within the Wind” on the 1963 March on Washington at which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his well-known “I Have a Dream” speech.
After an eight-year hiatus to pursue solo careers, the trio reunited in 1978 for a “Survival Sunday,” an anti-nuclear-power live performance that Yarrow had organized in Los Angeles. They would stay collectively till Travers’ loss of life in 2009. Upon her passing, Yarrow and Stookey continued to carry out each individually and collectively.
Born May 31, 1938, in New York, Yarrow was raised in an higher center class household he mentioned positioned excessive worth on artwork and scholarship. He took violin classes as a baby, later switching to guitar as he got here to embrace the work of such folk-music icons as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
Upon graduating from Cornell University in 1959, he returned to New York, the place he labored as a struggling Greenwich Village musician till connecting with Stookey and Travers. Although his diploma was in psychology, he had discovered his true calling in people music at Cornell when he labored as a educating assistant for a category in American folklore his senior 12 months.
“I did it for the cash as a result of I needed to scrub dishes much less and play guitar extra,” he advised the late report firm government Joe Smith. But as he led the category in tune, he started to find the emotional influence music may have on an viewers.
“I noticed these younger folks at Cornell who had been principally very conservative of their backgrounds opening their hearts up and singing with an emotionality and a priority by means of this car referred to as people music,” he mentioned. “It gave me a clue that the world was on its strategy to a sure form of motion, and that people music would possibly play an element in it and that I would play an element in people music.”
Soon 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 seeking to put collectively a bunch that may rival the Kingston Trio, which in 1958 had a success model of the normal people ballad “Tom Dooley.”
But Grossman needed a trio with a feminine singer and a member who might be humorous sufficient to maintain an viewers engaged with comedian patter. For the latter, Yarrow recommended 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 good friend of Travers, who as an adolescent had carried out and recorded with Seeger and others. Gripped by stage fright, she was reluctant to hitch the pair at first, altering her thoughts after she heard how properly her contralto voice melded with Yarrow’s tenor and Stookey’s baritone.
“We referred to as Noel up. He was there,” Yarrow mentioned, 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 grew to become 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, “In the Wind,” reached No. 4 and their third, “Moving,” put them again at No. 1.
From their earliest albums, the trio sang out towards struggle and injustice in songs like Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have all of the Flowers Gone,” Dylan’s “Blowin’ within the Wind” and “When the Ship Comes In” and Yarrow’s personal “Day is Done.”
They may additionally present a delicate and poignant facet, significantly on “Puff the Magic Dragon,” which Yarrow had written throughout his Cornell years with school good friend Leonard Lipton.
It tells the story of Jackie Paper, a younger boy who embarks on numerous adventures together with his make-believe dragon good friend till he outgrows such childhood fantasies and leaves a sobbing, heartbroken Puff behind. As Yarrow explains: “A dragon lives endlessly, however not so little boys.”
Some insisted they heard drug references within the tune, a competition on the coronary heart of a well-known scene within the movie “Meet the Parents,” when Ben Stiller angers his girlfriend’s tightly wound father (Robert De Niro) by saying “puff” refers to marijuana smoke. 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 Plane,” the trio cut up up the next 12 months to pursue solo careers.
