Peter Yarrow performs at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas at a three-day Vietnam War Summit, April 28, 2016. (LBJ Presidential Library\/Wikipedia)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The longtime resident of Manhattan\u2019s Upper West Side entered hospice last month. The cause of death was bladder cancer.<\/p>\n
Yarrow was a Cornell graduate playing in Greenwich Village clubs during the early 1960s folk revival when manager and musical impresario Albert Grossman, who also steered Bob Dylan\u2019s career, suggested he team up with the Kentucky-born singer Mary Travers. Travers in turn proposed they include Paul Stookey. <\/p>\n
After polishing their act at clubs in the Village like the Bitter End and the Gaslight, the trio signed with Warner and went on to record a series of hits, including folk standards like \u201cLemon Tree\u201d and \u201c500 Miles,\u201d and compositions by other revivalists, including Pete Seeger\u2019s \u201cIf I Had a Hammer\u201d and Dylan\u2019s \u201cBlowin\u2019 in the Wind.\u201d <\/p>\n
Their debut album, \u201cPeter, Paul and Mary,\u201d reached Billboard magazine\u2019s Top Ten for 10 months, including seven weeks at No. 1. They sang \u201cIf I had a Hammer\u201d at the August 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his \u201cI Have a Dream Speech.\u201d <\/p>\n
Yarrow wrote the music for the group\u2019s best-known composition, \u201cPuff, the Magic Dragon,\u201d with lyrics by his Cornell classmate Leonard Lipton. The song became a standard both at summer camps and in college dorm rooms, where the counterculture saw drug references that Yarrow always denied were there.<\/p>\n
In 1970, Yarrow served three months in prison for taking \u201cimproper liberties\u201d with a 14-year-old girl who came to his Washington, D.C., hotel room for an autograph. President Jimmy Carter granted a presidential pardon to Yarrow in 1981, on the last day of his presidency. Yarrow apologized for the incident, saying that \u201cit was an era of real indiscretion and mistakes by categorically male performers. I was one of them. I got nailed. I was wrong. I\u2019m sorry for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The conviction would occasionally lead to the cancellation of concerts at which he was scheduled to appear.<\/p>\n
The group performed regularly well after the folk revival faded. In a 1982 concert at Carnegie Hall they first sang \u201cLight One Candle,\u201d Yarrow\u2019s song about the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. Yarrow said he wrote the song (whose lyrics include \u201cLight one candle to bind us together with peace\u201d) to express his opposition to Israel\u2019s war that year in Lebanon; the trio performed it the next year in Jerusalem to a large and mostly enthusiastic audience. <\/p>\n
Yarrow was a supporter of the Israeli left-wing group Peace Now, which advocates for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2007 he traveled to Israel to promote his anti-bullying program, \u201cOperation Respect: Don\u2019t Laugh at Me,\u201d in a trip sponsored by The America-Israel Friendship League. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt is not proposing peace but it teaches children the skills of building peace in their own lives and that can translate into a perspective that they can bring into adulthood,\u201d he told an interviewer.<\/p>\n
Yarrow was born in 1938 in New York City. His mother was a high school teacher in Manhattan; his father, who emigrated from Ukraine at age 16, was a lawyer who helped create Radio Free Europe, a U.S. propaganda channel launched during the Cold War. His parents divorced when he was five. According to Yarrow, he had no contact with his father until his mid-30s, and credited his mother with instilling in him progressive values.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat was important was learning. It was a Jewish family,\u201d he told the Jewish Post in an interview. \u201cThere was money for education of every sort. There was money for music lessons, summer camp and for her children, but not for jewelry or Rolex watches. She never stopped working. She was really focused on things of great importance. This is where my value system arose and my commitment to being an activist was what she embraced.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yarrow attended the Interlochen music camp in Michigan, and studied physics and painting at New York\u2019s High School of Music and Art, part of what is now LaGuardia High School. He was a physics major at Cornell before switching to psychology.<\/p>\n
In the Jewish Post interview he said remained committed to Israel despite his disappointment with its increasingly right-wing politics.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not going to stop the dialogue,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m going to stand up for what is wonderful about Israel and not let what I consider to be a destructive policy destroy my commitment to making Israel all that it can be, fulfilling the promise of the creation of the Jewish State. And I have the same feelings about the Palestinians.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yarrow\u2019s widow, Mary Beth McCarthy, is the niece of Eugene J. McCarthy, the Minnesota senator who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968 on a platform opposing the war in Vietnam. Yarrow and Mary Beth divorced in 1991 and remarried in 2022. He is survived by her and their two children, Christopher and Bethany.<\/p>\n
Travers died in 2009. Paul Stookey is 87.<\/p>\n
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