LOS ANGELES (AP) — Peter Yarrow, the singer-songwriter greatest generally known as one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary, the folk-music trio whose impassioned harmonies transfixed hundreds of thousands as they lifted their voices in favor of civil rights and in opposition to battle, has died. He was 86.
Yarrow, who additionally co-wrote the group’s most enduring tune, “Puff the Magic Dragon,” died Tuesday in New York, publicist Ken Sunshine mentioned. Yarrow had bladder most cancers for the previous 4 years.
“Our fearless dragon is tired and has entered the last chapter of his magnificent life. The world knows Peter Yarrow the iconic folk activist, but the human being behind the legend is every bit as generous, creative, passionate, playful, and wise as his lyrics suggest,” his daughter Bethany mentioned in a press release.
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Throughout an unimaginable run of success spanning the Nineteen Sixties, Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers launched six Billboard Prime 10 singles, two No. 1 albums and received 5 Grammys.
Additionally they introduced early publicity to Bob Dylan by turning two of his songs, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” into Billboard Prime 10 hits as they helped lead an American renaissance in folks music. They carried out “Blowin’ in 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 might stay collectively till Travers’ loss of life in 2009. Upon her passing, Yarrow and Stookey continued to carry out each individually and collectively.
Born Could 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 toddler, later switching to guitar as he got here to embrace the work of such folk-music icons as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
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Upon graduating from Cornell College in 1959, he returned to New York, the place he labored as a struggling Greenwich Village musician till connecting with Stookey and Travers. Though his diploma was in psychology, he had discovered his true calling in folks music at Cornell when he labored as a educating assistant for a category in American folklore his senior yr.
“I did it for the money because I wanted to wash dishes less and play guitar more,” he advised the late report firm government Joe Smith. However as he led the category in tune, he started to find the emotional affect music may have on an viewers.
“I saw these young people at Cornell who were basically very conservative in their backgrounds opening their hearts up and singing with an emotionality and a concern through this vehicle called folk music,” he mentioned. “It gave me a clue that the world was on its way to a certain kind of movement, and that folk music might play a part in it and that I might play a part in folk music.”
Quickly 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 trying to put collectively a gaggle that might rival the Kingston Trio, which in 1958 had successful model of the standard folks ballad “Tom Dooley.”
However Grossman wished 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 advised 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 buddy of Travers, who as a youngster had carried out and recorded with Pete Seeger and others. Gripped by stage fright, she was reluctant to hitch the pair at first, altering her thoughts after she heard how nicely her contralto voice melded with Yarrow’s tenor and Stookey’s baritone.
“We called Noel up. He was there,” Yarrow mentioned, recalling the primary time the three carried out collectively. “We mentioned a bunch of folk songs, which he didn’t know because he didn’t have a real folk-music background, and wound up singing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’ And it was immediately great, was just as clear as a bell, and we started working.”
After months of rehearsal the three turned 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 in opposition to battle and injustice in songs like 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” and Yarrow’s personal “Day is Done.”
They might additionally present a comfortable and poignant facet, notably on “Puff the Magic Dragon,” which Yarrow had written throughout his Cornell years with faculty buddy Leonard Lipton.
Along with daughter Bethany, he’s survived by his spouse, Marybeth, son Christopher, and granddaughter Valentina.
AP Entertainment Author Mark Kennedy contributed reporting from New York. Rogers, the principal author of this obituary, retired from The Related Press in 2021.
