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Peter Yarrow, whose caring and righteous vocals for the trio Peter, Paul and Mary helped set up them as probably the most widespread folks acts of the Sixties, died on Tuesday at his dwelling on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 86.
His demise was confirmed by Ken Sunshine, his publicist. Mr. Sunshine mentioned the trigger was bladder most cancers, which Mr. Yarrow had been battling for the previous 4 years.
On most of the trio’s recordings they break up the vocal elements equally, braiding Mr. Yarrow’s exact tenor round Noel Paul Stookey’s mild baritone and Mary Travers’s heat contralto. But Mr. Yarrow additionally had some outstanding lead vocals as properly, fronting such well-known group recordings as “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “Day Is Done” and “The Great Mandala,” all of which he both wrote or co-wrote. “Puff” grew to become a No. 2 Billboard hit, whereas “Day Is Done” grazed the Top 20.
Mr. Yarrow wrote many different songs recorded by the group, typically in collaboration with Mr. Stookey, the final surviving member of the group (Ms. Travers died in 2009 at 72).
In their peak years, Peter, Paul and Mary reached the Billboard Top 40 12 occasions; six of these songs made it onto the Top 10, together with one, their cowl of John Denver’s “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane,” that reached No. 1. They racked up 5 Billboard Top 10 albums and twice topped the journal’s album chart.
Like many people teams of the day, Peter, Paul and Mary had been as well-known for his or her progressive politics as for his or her music. In August 1963, they took half within the March on Washington, the positioning 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’ within the Wind,” which that they had become a Top Five Billboard hit that month; their Washington efficiency helped set up it as a civil rights anthem.
The trio additionally recorded songs and gave concert events supporting the liberal presidential candidates Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972. Mr. Yarrow’s lyrics typically emphasised the group’s political dedication: “The Great Mandala,” launched in 1967, informed the story of a battle protester on a starvation strike; “Day Is Done” (1969), addressed to his son, means that the approaching technology would possibly create a extra simply world.
“Day Is Done” and “Puff the Magic Dragon,” which each featured easy singalong choruses and willfully harmless factors of view, doubled as kids’s songs. Decades later, Mr. Yarrow turned every of them into an illustrated kids’s e-book. “Puff” additionally impressed an animated TV particular in 1978 that was widespread sufficient to spawn two sequels.
Peter Yarrow was born on May 31, 1938, in Manhattan to Bernard and Vera (Burtakoff) Yarrow, Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. His father, a lawyer, was an assistant district lawyer in New York underneath Thomas E. Dewey. He later grew to become a vice chairman of the C.I.A.-funded group Radio Free Europe.
Mr. Yarrow’s dad and mom divorced when he was 5. His father later transformed to Protestantism, however Mr. Yarrow thought-about Jewish teachings a significant inspiration in his life.
He studied portray on the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) in Manhattan. During his school years at Cornell, he started singing and enjoying guitar after attending a course in American folks literature taught by the folklorist and historian Harold William Thompson.
After graduating, Mr. Yarrow moved to New York City and have become a performer on the fruitful Greenwich Village folks scene. “I went with the concept I need to be concerned in music that creates group,” he informed the music journal Rebeat in 2015 — music, he added, “that reaches folks’s hearts and mobilizes folks for a extra humane society.”
His success within the Village led to an invite to look on a CBS tv particular, “Folk Sound USA,” in 1960. It additionally earned him an opportunity to play the Newport Folk Festival, the place he met Albert Grossman, a founding father of the competition and the manager of the singer Odetta.
Mr. Grossman wished to create a brand new group that may develop and replace the components of the Weavers, a folks concord group consisting of a lady and three males (one in every of them Pete Seeger), which loved important success within the Fifties. He paired Mr. Yarrow with Ms. Travers, who had appeared in Village golf equipment and sung a number of occasions with Mr. Seeger. The duo grew to become a trio when, at Ms. Travers’s suggestion, they added Noel Paul Stookey, with whom she had carried out at an area membership. Using Mr. Stookey’s center identify, they settled on their catchy biblical moniker.
The trio introduced a compelling visible picture: The two males, sporting darkish ties, beatnik goatees and severe expressions, flanked Ms. Travers, whose blond hair framed noble cheekbones. Mr. Grossman booked them for a run on the Bitter End on Bleecker Street, and a buzz was created. In 1961, the group signed with Warner Bros. Records, which issued their debut album, known as merely “Peter, Paul and Mary,” the next May.
Mr. Yarrow sang lead on the group’s first single, “Lemon Tree,” based mostly on a Brazilian folks tune, which reached the Billboard Top 40. The full album rose to No. 1 after their second single, “If I Had a Hammer,” written by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays of the Weavers, grew to become a Top 10 hit and gained two Grammy Awards. The album stayed within the Top 20 for 2 years and bought greater than two million copies.
The group’s follow-up, “Movin’,” launched in early 1963, featured “Puff the Magic Dragon,” whose lyrics had been based mostly on a poem {that a} pal of Mr. Yarrow’s, Lenny Lipton, had written when he was 19, impressed by an earlier poem by Ogden Nash titled “The Tale of Custard the Dragon.” Speculation later arose that the tune referred to smoking marijuana, an interpretation Mr. Yarrow strongly denied.
In June 1963, the trio launched their cowl of “Blowin’ within the Wind.” (Bob Dylan was one other consumer of Mr. Grossman’s.) It bought an estimated 300,000 copies in its first week. By mid-August it had hit No. 2; it went on to promote greater than one million copies. Their model of one other Dylan tune, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” broke the Billboard Top 10, boosting the author’s personal album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” into the Top 30.
In 1964, Mr. Yarrow joined the board of the Newport Folk Festival. In 1970, he conceived the New Folks Concert on the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas, which grew to become an annual occasion. The 12 months earlier than, he had helped arrange the National Mobilization to End the War, an anti-Vietnam War protest in Washington attended by an estimated half million folks.
Peter, Paul and Mary had the largest hit of their profession in 1970 when “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane,” that includes Ms. Travers’s craving contralto, reached No. 1. But mere months later, they introduced their break up.
They broke up partly to pursue solo careers, but additionally as a result of Mr. Yarrow had been accused of creating sexual advances towards a 14-year-old woman who had come to his dressing room together with her 17-year-old sister looking for an autograph in 1969. He served three months of a one-to-three-year jail sentence after pleading responsible to taking “indecent liberties” with the woman.
In 1981, Mr. Yarrow obtained a presidential pardon from Jimmy Carter, although the case continued to be a problem for a few years throughout election campaigns for politicians whom Mr. Yarrow supported.
In 2019, in the course of the peak of the #MeToo motion towards sexual abuse of ladies, a scheduled efficiency by Mr. Yarrow at an upstate New York arts competition was canceled in response to protests. A remorseful Mr. Yarrow responded in a press release by saying that the organizers’ option to exclude him was not “unfair or unjust.”
“I don’t search to attenuate or excuse what I’ve performed and I can’t adequately categorical my apologies and sorrow for the ache and damage I’ve brought on,” he mentioned in a press release to The New York Times.
In 1969, Mr. Yarrow married Marybeth McCarthy, a niece of the Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. (Mr. Stookey wrote “Wedding Song,” which has since been carried out of their honor at marriage ceremony ceremonies around the globe.) The marriage led to divorce, however they remarried in 2022. In addition to her, Mr. Yarrow is survived by a son, Christopher; a daughter, Bethany; and a granddaughter.
Mr. Yarrow launched his first solo album, titled “Peter,” in 1972, however gross sales had been tepid. He loved much more success 4 years later with “Torn Between Two Lovers,” a tune he wrote with Phillip Jarrell, which grew to become a No. 1 hit for the middle-of-the-road pop singer Mary MacGregor.
Peter, Paul and Mary reunited for one-off profit concert events in 1972 and 1978. After their second reunion, they started touring commonly, and so they continued to carry out till Ms. Travers’s demise. In the years since, Mr. Yarrow and Mr. Stookey periodically carried out collectively.
In a press release on Tuesday, Mr. Stookey known as Mr. Yarrow his “artistic, irrepressible, spontaneous and musical youthful brother” however added that he additionally “grew to be glad about, and to like, the mature-beyond-his-years knowledge and provoking steerage he shared with me like an older brother.”
“Perhaps Peter was each of the brothers I by no means had,” Mr. Stookey mentioned, “and I shall deeply miss each of him.”
In 2000, Mr. Yarrow helped begin Operation Respect, a nonprofit group devoted to combating bullying and selling tolerance amongst kids.
Later in life, he typically carried out together with his daughter and the cellist Rufus Cappadocia in a trio often called Peter, Bethany and Rufus. Their success bolstered Mr. Yarrow’s religion in his chosen style.
“I consider folks music has had a optimistic impact on the decency, humanity and empathy of society,” he informed Reuters in 2008. “Peter, Paul and Mary had an enormous viewers, a few of whom didn’t agree with our politics. But they had been touched by the human essence of our songs.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
