PETER YARROW,
1938-2025

Peter Yarrow, a linchpin of the 1960s folk-rock scene as part of the pioneering trio Peter, Paul and Mary, died Tuesday (1/7) at his home in New York. The cause was bladder cancer. He was 86.

Yarrow, who was born in Manhattan, began his musical life while a student at Cornell University. After his graduation, he returned home and started performing on the Greenwich Village folk scene, developing enough of a reputation to earn an invitation to play the 1960 Newport Folk Festival. In 2015, he told Rebeat magazine, “I went with the idea that I want to be involved in music that creates community. [Music] that reaches people’s hearts and mobilizes people for a more humane society.”

Promoter-manager Albert Grossman teamed him with fellow singers Paul Stookey and Mary Travers, a lineup intended to echo The Weavers. Peter, Paul and Mary's debut album, issued by Warner Bros. in 1961, stayed in the Top 20 for two years and sold more than 2m copies, spawning a Top 10 hit with a cover of Pete Seeger and Lee Hays’ “If I Had a Hammer.”

The group attained even greater success—and some notoriety—two years later with the Yarrow-penned “Puff the Magic Dragon,” which rose to #2 on the singles chart. Upon its release and for years afterward, pundits posited that the song was an ode to marijuana, which Yarrow consistently denied.

They were closely affiliated with Bob Dylan, leading to Yarrow's being depicted in the recent semi-biopic A Complete Unknown as a peacemaker trying to calm an angry crowd after Zimmy went electric at Newport. Like many of their peers, Peter, Paul and Mary also embedded themselves in progressive politics, performing at scores of benefits for Democratic presidential candidates Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern and singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

The group recorded consistently throughout the 1960s, notching its sole #1 with “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane," written by friend John Denver, in early 1970. They split shortly thereafter, though they regularly reunited to perform for a wide range of causes.

In 1970, Yarrow was arrested for “taking improper liberties” with a 14-year-old girl, an offense that earned him a one-to-three-year prison sentence. He admitted guilt, served three months and was pardoned in 1981 by President Jimmy Carter.

He went on to record solo projects throughout the '70s.

While Yarrow continued to perform regularly with the trio until Travers’ death, in 2009, and then as a solo artist, he devoted most of his later life to activism. He supported freedom for Soviet Jewry and aiding Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange, but his primary focus was on Operation Respect, an anti-bullying group he founded in 2000 that was recognized with a Congressional resolution in 2003.

Speaking to Reuters in 2008, he said, “Operation Respect has been my main and all-consuming work for the past 10 years. My perception is that the kind of bullying, humiliation that goes on in children's schools leads to high rates of depression that was virtually unknown when I was young and the high suicide rate of teenagers, which we know is almost inevitably caused by bullying or mean-spiritedness."

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