Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary, 1938 -2025

Peter Yarrow — the singer-songwriter and social activist best known as part of the seminal folk harmony trio Peter Paul & Mary — died at his home in New York City on January 7, 2025 following a four year-bout with bladder cancer. He was 86.

Peter, Paul and Mary’s music and social activism helped to shape a generation. Through the years, the popular and inspirational folk trio who frequently sang out against war and injustice touched the hearts and consciences of millions of people worldwide, won five Grammy Awards, received eight gold and five platinum records, released six Billboard top 10 singles, had two #1 Billboard chart-topping albums and a dozen top 40 hits, and have been the subject of five PBS documentaries.

Peter Yarrow was born on May 31, 1938 in New York City. Although he took violin lessons as a child, inspired by folks like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, he later switched to guitar. After graduating from Cornell University in 1959 with a degree in Psychology (although he also was a teaching assistant in an American folklore class), Yarrow returned to NYC and began playing the folk clubs and basket houses of Greenwich Village. After meeting music impresario Albert Grossman (who managed Dylan, Janis Joplin, Odetta, and others) who was eager to work with a folk harmony group, Yarrow set about with Grossman to launch one.

Peter, Paul and Mary – featuring Yarrow (guitar and tenor vocals), Noel Paul Stookey’s (guitar and gentle baritone vocals) and Mary Travers’ (contralto vocals) — formed in 1961, having made its first public appearance that fall at the Bitter End on Bleecker Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The trio’s eponymous debut album, released on Warner Brothers Records in May 1962, topped the charts that summer, remained in the Billboard magazine top 10 for ten months and the top 20 for two years, sold more than two-million copies, and featured the Grammy Award-winning hit single, “If I Had a Hammer.” That song, penned by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays of The Weavers (whom Yarrow viewed as early mentors), became an anthem of the civil rights movement and was performed by the trio on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, along with its rendition of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” during the historic 1963 March on Washington at which the late Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

The trio’s sophomore release, Movin’, featured “Puff the Magic Dragon,” a now classic song co-written by Yarrow and his college friend Lenny Lipton while at Cornell that has been a children’s favorite for decades and also was the inspiration behind a 1978 animated TV special and was made into an illustrated children’s book by Yarrow. Although some believe that the song contains drug references, suggesting that “puff” refers to marijuana smoke, Yarrow maintained that the song about a young boy and his make-believe dragon friend just reflected the loss of childhood innocence. “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys.”

Peter, Paul and Mary’s rendition of “ Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” was released in the summer of 1963 and also became a big hit for the trio. Archival footage of the trio performing the song during the march appears in the 2014 PBS documentary 50 Years with Peter, Paul and Mary, produced and directed by Emmy Award-winner Jim Brown. As Yarrow observes in the documentary, it was time when “music began to inspire America, tweak its conscience, and articulate its dreams.”

Besides “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the trio also recorded Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In” and Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” with its rendition of the latter song also landing in Billboard’s top 10. Yarrow served on the board of the Newport Folk Festival and helped to emcee the event in 1965 when Dylan went electric. Famously, as recreated in the widely acclaimed Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown that is currently screening at movie theaters, Dylan borrowed Yarrow’s guitar to play “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”

Although Peter, Paul and Mary performed together over the span of 50 years, there were times when the trio was on hiatus with each of its members pursuing solo careers and projects. The first such break came in 1970, shortly after the release of the trio’s cover of John Denver’s “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane” and Yarrow’s conviction after pleading guilty to taking “indecent liberties” with an under-age girl who had come to his dressing room seeking an autograph in 1969, for which he served three months in prison.

While “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane” was its last number one hit, Yarrow penned “Light One Candle” for the trio in 1982 – while war was raging in Lebanon – that has since become a popular Chanukah song. Peter, Paul and Mary performed “Light One Candle” — whose lyrics commemorate a war of national liberation fought by the Maccabees, while also calling for peace in the Middle East – for several years before recording it on its 1986 studio album No Easy Walk to Freedom. Its moving lyrics include: “Light one candle for the terrible sacrifice justice and freedom demand. Light one candle for the wisdom to know when the peacemaker’s time is at hand.” The 1986 album’s title track is a civil rights anthem that Yarrow co-wrote with Margery Tabankin.

Both prior to and in the years since Mary Travers passing in 2009, Peter — both solo and with Noel “Paul” Stookey and others –- continued to make music and to lend his voice and support to causes in which he passionately believed.

An anti-war activist, Yarrow helped to organize and produce a number of large events including peace concerts at NYC’s Madison Square Garden and Shea Stadium, as well as the 1969 “Celebration of Life” march and demonstration in Washington, DC during which some 500,000 people demanded an end to America’s involvement in Vietnam.

Yarrow was a major champion of other songwriters who particularly sought to nurture the talents of new and emerging ones who, as he put it, “write from the heart.” A founding board member of the Newport Folk Festival, he also developed and hosted a Sunday afternoon concert focused on emerging folk artists and songwriters – providing earl opportunities to such artists as Eric Anderson, Tim Hardin and Buffy St. Marie. Ten years later, in 1972, he partnered with Rod Kennedy, the late founder-producer of the Kerrville Folk Festival to establish what’s now the Grassy Hill Kerrville New Folk Competition for Emerging Songwriters. The Kerrville New Folk Concerts have become a highlight of the annual festival that is geared towards singer-songwriters of various musical styles and is the longest continuously running festival of its kind in North America.

Yarrow believed that music could be a transformative tool for informing the ethical sensibilities of children. In 1999, he established Operation Respect — an educational nonprofit organization and program that seeks to teach children about tolerance and respect for each other’s differences – using music, video, and conflict resolution curricula developed by Educators for Social Responsibility. In an interview with AcousticMusicScene.com in 2010, Yarrow maintained that “all kids deserve to grow up accepting each other,” expressing concern that 160,000 American children refuse to go to school because of cruelty, according to the American Association of School psychologists. Citing “our need to inherit a peaceful world,” he noted that peace education was regarded as “seditious” when the Operation Respect program was launched. It has since been incorporated into the curriculum of some 22,000 U.S. elementary and middle schools.

A former board member of the Connecticut Hospice, where he also periodically sang for patients and staff, he was long active on behalf of the hospice movement.

Last April, Yarrow joined Stookey in in performing in Boston during a Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Peter, Paul and Mary were among the inaugural class of inductees.

As Yarrow told AcousticMusicScene.com in 2010: “”Music can be used as a powerful force in a world where we desperately need it … Music is something that binds the hearts and can bring us together.” Here’s a link to read that article: https://acousticmusicscene.com/2010/11/27/the-peter-yarrow-sing-along-special-airs-on-pbs-stations/

Many of Peter Yarrow’s songs and those by other songwriters that Peter, Paul and Mary covered over the decades have a timeless quality to them and multigenerational appeal. For Peter Yarrow, “Day is Done,” yet his music and that of Peter, Paul and Mary lives on. So too do his widow Mary Beth (the niece of the late Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-MN), whom he met during a 1968 Democratic presidential primary campaign event and married the following year), his daughter Bethany, son Christopher, granddaughter Valentina, and lots of adoring fans.

Editor’s Note: I’m glad that I got to see Peter Yarrow in concert and at various political events & social actions over the years and had the opportunity to meet and interview him for AcousticMusicScene.com and a couple other publications.

Our folk community mourns his passing, as well as the recent deaths of Mike Brewer (a Missouri-based folk-rock singer-songwriter who, with his musical partner Tom Shipley, recorded the hit song “One Toke Over the Line”), David Mallet (the Maine-based singer-songwriter best known for “Garden Song”), and Josh White, Jr. (a Michigan-based singer and guitarist who followed in his late father’s folk and blues footsteps for decades).