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PETER YARROW, SINGER WITH FOLK LEGENDS PETER, PAUL & MARY AND
CO-WRITER OF ‘PUFF THE MAGIC DRAGON,’ DIES AT 86  
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Jem Aswad and Chris Willman
January 7, 2025
Variety
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_ The spirit that bound us together so powerfully so many decades ago
is still in our in our culture, in our hearts and in our DNA. In the
era of the animosities of our time, it’s something that’s so
restorative, so confirmational. No, we're not gone. _

, Peter Yarrow // Boston Globe

 

Peter Yarrow [[link removed]], one third of the
chart-topping 1960s folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary — which helped
popularize Bob Dylan [[link removed]] as the voice
of a generation — co-writer of the song “Puff, the Magic Dragon”
and a prominent social activist, died Tuesday morning at his home in
New York City “with his family by his side,” a rep confirms
to _Variety. _Yarrow had been battling cancer for four years; he was
86.

Peter, Paul and Mary were a leading light of the booming folk-music
scene of the early 1960s, which famously centered around the
nightclubs and cafes of New York’s Greenwich Village. Yarrow had
begun singing while a student at Cornell University and performed in
New York and at the Newport Folk Festival, where he was spotted by
manager Albert Grossman, who had a vision of “an updated version of
the Weavers,” the legendary folk group featuring Pete Seeger.
Singers Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers were soon recruited and,
using Stookey’s middle name, Peter, Paul and Mary were born.

The trio signed with Warner Bros. Records and achieved success quickly
with their first singles, “The Lemon Tree” and “If I Had a
Hammer,” and won two Grammy Awards in 1962. But it was their cover
of Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” released in June of 1963,
which they performed while standing beside the Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr. at the historic March on Washington that August, that truly made
them into a cultural force, not to mention superstars.

(Not coincidentally, Dylan was also managed by Grossman, Although the
new Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown
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does not dramatize how much the trio popularized his music in the
early ’60s, Yarrow’s character appears in the film, played by Nick
Pupo, seen engaged in debate as a founding member of the board of
directors of the Newport Folk Festival.)

The trio would score many hits over the following years — including
with the Yarrow-co-written “Puff the Magic Dragon” — yet would
remain indelibly associated with those early years. Later in his life
Yarrow would focus intensively on social activism and spoke often
against the war in Vietnam and on other subjects.

The group’s initial run came to an end in 1970 when they broke up
and pursued solo careers. Beyond his own albums, Yarrow had a No. 1
hit as a songwriter with “Torn Between Two Lovers,” recorded by
Mary MacGregor, which topped the Hot 100 for two weeks in 1976.

Peter, Paul and Mary first reunited in 1972 to perform at a benefit
for George McGovern’s presidential campaign. They came together
again in 1978 at an anti-nukes concert. Thereafter, they resumed
regular touring and often played dozens of shows a year, which
continued until Travers died in 2009.

In an interview 
[[link removed]]for
the podcast “The American Radio Show,” Yarrow looked back on the
trio’s early success. “The first album that we did had songs on it
such as ‘If I Had a Hammer,’ ‘Lemon Tree,’ ‘Where Have
All the Flowers Gone?’ And that album had quite a lot of success
and was up near the top of the charts. The second album had ‘Puff
the Magic Dragon’ on it. The music had shifted from popular music to
music that had become the soundtrack of the consciousness of the
change that was going on in America, and our music was a bridge for
many people to the music of Bob Dylan, for example.

“‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ was just a kids’ song. But I had no
idea it would become so successful. When we sang ‘Blowin’ in the
Wind,’ Bob Dylan was unheard of. He’d recorded a demo of that
song, but that was it. The same for ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ by
John Denver and ‘In the Early Morning Rain’ by Gordon Lightfoot.
We recorded songs based on a different process from that used in
commercial music. We recorded songs that really got to us, that moved
us, that reached our hearts. The success was a result of that. You
can’t reduce the success of the music of the ’60s to a formula
involving arrangements and musical presentation. It was a matter of
finding the songs, and going to the heart of the songs, and then
creating something that we really wanted to share.”

Yarrow was memorialized Tuesday by family and cohorts. His daughter
Bethany said:  “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. Driven by a deep belief that a more compassionate and
respectful world is possible, my father has lived a cause driven life
full of love and purpose. He always believed, with his whole heart,
that singing together could change the world. Please don’t stop
believing in magic dragons. Hope dies when we stop believing, stop
caring, and stop singing.  He may have been a dyed-in-the-wool
progressive, but his passion and music touched people of all ages and
political stripes around the world. ”

His longtime bandmate, Noel Paul Stookey (“Paul” of Peter, Paul
and Mary), stated: “Being an only child, growing up without
siblings, may have afforded me the full attention of my parents, but
with the formation of Peter, Paul and Mary, I suddenly had a brother
named Peter Yarrow. He was best man at my wedding and I at his. He
was a loving ‘uncle’ to my three daughters. And, while his
comfort in the city and my love of the country tended to keep us apart
geographically, our different perspectives were celebrated often in
our friendship and our music. I was five months older than Peter —
who became my creative, irrepressible, spontaneous and musical younger
brother — yet at the same time, I grew to be grateful for, and to
love, the mature-beyond-his-years wisdom and inspiring guidance he
shared with me like an older brother. Politically astute and
emotionally vulnerable, perhaps Peter was both of the brothers I never
had… and I shall deeply miss both of him.”

Yarrow’s legacy was stained by a conviction for taking indecent
liberties with a child — a 14-year-old girl — in the late 1970s.
The incident reemerged when reporters brought to light that President
Jimmy Carter had pardoned Yarrow on the day before Ronald Reagan
assumed the office. Wrote the Washington Post
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a 2021 article investigating the aftermath, the newspaper wrote that
“this pardon by Carter — perhaps the only one in U.S. history
wiping away a conviction for a sexual offense against a child —
escaped scrutiny when it happened. It was granted just hours before
the American hostages in Iran were freed, which captured headlines for
weeks. … Yarrow’s crime was mostly forgotten after he served less
than three months in jail,” with the rest of his one-to-three-year
sentence suspended.

Another woman filed suit in 2021, claiming she had been raped by
Yarrow in 1969, when she was a minor. The Post reported that she
settled with Yarrow soon thereafter.

Stookey and Yarrow performed shows together as a duo in the late
2010s, up through as recently as last summer. A review of a joint
appearance
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Minneapolis in 2017 said, “Any concern that I had that the duo would
be incomplete without Mary disappeared soon after these two
near-octogenarians took the stage. Their two guitars and still
near-perfect vocals made for an incredible and passionate evening of
music… Those attending expecting only a night of nostalgia with
these 1960s protest singers received much more: it was a night of
night of reinvigoration for the causes of peace and a better world.”
Included in the Peter-and-Paul reunion shows was a new song of
Stookey’s called “Work Together,” described as “reject(ing)
calls to put the election behind us and work together on the Trump
agenda… Always the rebel, Peter Yarrow insisted on taking a knee in
protest at the concert – even though pulling it off had the expected
level of difficult for a man his age.”

In an April 2024 interview
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the Duluth Reader prior to a tour stop there, Yarrow talked about
music and its relation to social movements, past and present.

Folk music “still exists, it still has a place,” he said last
year, “but it’s a very minor place compared to pop music. And pop
music is, to a large degree, a wasteland. It’s not so with certain
artists. I mean Lady Gaga has a hell of a conscience; Alicia Keys
sings about it and she walks the walk, and so does Taylor Swift, who
is a beacon of feminism for teenage girls: Don’t allow the
repression that you feel from young men your age to become a
reflection of your self-confidence, your essence or self-esteem.
Because you are powerful, you are the voice and you can meet them in
mutual terrain rather than simply be reactive to the male-dominant
culture that we’ve inherited.” Yarrow even likened Swift’s
lyrics to “Peter Paul and Mary
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singing to peaceniks, she’s singing to young women who are hopefully
not going to allow themselves to be repressed by a male culture of
dominance that has brought us to where we are today.” 

He continued, “I mean, it is the oppressed people of the world —
you know the biblical invocation, ‘the meek shall inherit the
earth.’ Look who’s strengthening now — the women. Can you
imagine what’s has happened with women with the ‘Pussy March,’
etc. etc. I mean, my God, women are showing up and saying ‘I will
not!’ And the oppressed! The LGBTQ showed up and the Black community
with Black Lives Matter — the first national gathering of a movement
that completely blanketed America where the people, instead of saying
‘where are the people in the streets now that these terrible
atrocities have occurred?’ The people were in the streets. And also
the students! The students who have been organized… 

“We are talking about marginalized people coming into their own.
Now, while the Trump reality is growing in its metastatic way, we also
have the coalescence of those who have been oppressed to feel their
strength. And alas, we don’t have music to accompany that the way we
did in the Civil Rights and Vietnam War movements. But nevertheless
those movements are in progress.”

Of his recent shows, Yarrow said, “It’s really a remarkable
phenomenon because the kind of warmth and enthusiasm and caring, that
was once just expected and taken for granted, is reignited amongst
people when they sing together, songs like ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’
or ‘Leavin’ on a Jet Plane.’ It’s phenomenally moving because
it kind of asserts the spirit that bound us together so powerfully so
many decades ago and still is in our in our culture and in our hearts
and in our DNA. In the era of the animosities of our time, it’s
something that’s so restorative to people, so confirmational. No,
we’re not gone, no, we still believe in something together. Yes, we
still have positive advocacy. Truth, fact, is not a moving target.
There are real facts that exist. We have to understand that the
dangerous slide of the culture and politics into this polarized,
hate-filled perspective is not something that necessarily has to
subdue us.”

After Yarrow’s death was announced, his daughter Bethany encouraged
donations to her father’s cause: “To honor my father and his
legacy In lieu of flowers or any other kind of gift, please consider
making a contribution to his not-for-profit, Operation Respect
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anti-bullying program that has been implemented in over 22,000 schools
internationally, helping to create the next generation of empathetic,
caring, respectful citizens. It would bring him great joy and peace to
know that his life’s work of will continue on.” 

He is survived by his wife Marybeth, son Christopher, Bethany and
granddaughter Valentina. 

A memorial service will be announced at a later date.

_Jem Aswad, who launched Variety’s music section with former
executive music editor Shirley Halperin in 2017, has held senior
editorial posts at Billboard, MTV News, Spin, Time Out New York and
CMJ._

_Chris Willman is Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic at
Variety. He joined the publication in 2018 and is based in Los
Angeles. Willman began his career at the Los Angeles Times, going on
to spend 13 years at Entertainment Weekly as a senior writer and
critic._

_VARIETY is the most authoritative and trusted source of
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* folk music
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* 1963 march on washington
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