Peter Yarrow, the pioneering folk musician who found massive success as part of the musical trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, has died at the age of 86, according to the Associated Press.
Yarrow was born in New York City in 1938, and went on to become one of the most successful musicians to emerge from New York City’s storied Greenwich Village folk music scene of the early 1960s after graduating from Cornell University. The storied music manager Albert Grossman teamed Yarrow with Mary Travers and and Noel “Paul” Stookey to form Peter, Paul, and Mary, and the trio kicked off the folk music explosion with their 1962 eponymous debut album, which quickly hit #1 on the Billboard charts thanks to the band’s cover of the Pete Seeger classic (and controversial Communist anthem) “If I Had A Hammer.” That cover would also go on to earn the band two Grammy Awards.
Peter, Paul, and Mary’s NYC contemporaries included Joan Baez, Dave von Ronk, and Bob Dylan, the latter of whom may never have reached the mainstream success he eventually reaped if the trio had not decided to cover a song from his Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan LP called “Blowin’ In The Wind” in June of 1963. The Peter, Paul and Mary version of “Blowin” quickly skyrocketed to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, selling over a million copies by that August, when the band performed the song during the historic March on Washington. The song left an indelible mark on culture, and will always be regarded as one of the key anthems of the civil rights movement of the ’60s.
Dylan, while appreciative that the cover expanded the reach of his music to millions and millions of people worldwide (and made him more money than he had ever seen up to that point), slagged the band in private; Yarrow is featured as an antagonistic sellout foil for Dylan’s prickly artistic genius in James Mangold’s 2024 Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, both during their shared time performing in the coffeehouses of the West Village and during the Newport Folk Festival when Dylan infamously “went electric.” (Footage of Peter, Paul, and Mary from this time can be seen in Murray Lerner’s 1967 documentary, Festival!)
Yarrow’s best known original composition is almost certainly “Puff The Magic Dragon,” a devastating song about childish innocence lost. It’s been covered by hundreds of artists, and is well known as one of the most anthemic folk songs ever recorded. Yarrow always denied that the song was a thinly veiled ode to the pleasures of smoking reefer, but that didn’t stop Ben Stiller’s Gregory Focker in Meet The Parents from trying to bond with his future father-in-law by running with that theory. (Bob De Niro did NOT agree.)
Yarrow was convicted of taking “improper liberties” with a female minor in 1970, and served three months in prison; Yarrow was given a presidential pardon the late Jimmy Carter in 1981.
Following that unfortunate incident, Peter, Paul, and Mary went on the road and toured pretty continuously up until Mary Travers death in 2009; the trio’s magical harmonies were captured in a 1986 special Peter, Paul, and Mary: The 25th Anniversary Concert, which is probably still airing on a PBS station somewhere across these great United States. The band earned 5 Grammy Awards among 16 nominations across its 40+ year career.
According to his publicist, Yarrow died in his Upper West Side home on Tuesday, January 7, 2025 as a result of the bladder cancer he had been fighting for the past four years. Yarrow was 84 at the time of his death.
