Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey and Mary Travers on The Jack Benny Program, circa 1963. Photo / Getty Images
Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey and Mary Travers on The Jack Benny Program, circa 1963. Photo / Getty Images
Warning: Mentions sexual abuse.
Peter Yarrow was a singer-songwriter and guitarist who found fame as a member of the 1960s folk trio, Peter, Paul and Mary.
Yarrow was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1981 after pleading guilty to taking “immoral and improper liberties” with a minor in 1970.
He died aged 86 from bladder cancer on Tuesday.
Peter Yarrow, a member of the influential trio Peter, Paul and Mary, which popularised folk music in the 1960s with Blowin’ in the Wind, If I Had a Hammer and other protest anthems, but who saw his reputation tarnished when he pleaded guilty to a morals charge involving a minor, died on January 7 at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.
The cause was bladder cancer, his publicist Ken Sunshine said.
From 1961 to 1970, Peter, Paul and Mary — two bearded guitarists and a soulful blonde — became one of the signature acts of the era’s folk revival.
In addition to playing guitar and singing alongside Mary Travers and Noel Paul Stookey, Yarrow co-wrote one of the group’s best-known songs, Puff, the Magic Dragon. Controversy over its supposed references to marijuana may have boosted its popularity.
The group’s self-titled first album, released in 1962, sold more than 2 million copies. It spawned several hit singles, including Will Holt’s Lemon Tree and then If I Had a Hammer, written in 1949 by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays.
The trio’s success gave Yarrow a platform to promote social causes. He was involved in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, then later worked on behalf of efforts to secure women’s rights, free Soviet Jewry, alleviate famine, end apartheid in South Africa and curtail bullying in schools.
Peter Yarrow, Mary Travers, and Noel 'Paul' Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary in 1962 in Greenwich Village, New York. Photo / Getty Images
Of Peter, Paul and Mary, he said, “We weren’t there just to entertain.”
The group was the brainchild of Yarrow’s manager, Albert Grossman, who in 1960 decided to form a trio that would emulate the Weavers, the folk quartet started by Seeger and others after World War ll.
Grossman introduced Yarrow to Travers, who had grown up in Greenwich Village and occasionally performed with Seeger when she wasn’t caring for her toddler daughter. Yarrow and Travers sang the union anthem Miner’s Lifeguard and liked the way they sounded together.
Travers suggested that her friend Stookey, then working as a musician and stand-up comic, might complete the trio. At Stookey’s audition, the three-way harmony “was magic”, Yarrow said.
With the help of producer and arranger Milt Okun, Peter, Paul and Mary rehearsed for seven months before making their debut in 1961 at the Bitter End nightclub in Greenwich Village.
Several of their best known songs, including the haunting anti-war ballad The Great Mandala, were written or co-written by Yarrow.
Puff, the Magic Dragon grew out of a poem that Yarrow’s Cornell University roommate, Lenny Lipton, had written. Yarrow, while still an undergraduate in 1959, found the poem and set it to music. Puff told the story of a boy, Jackie Paper, who plays with a dragon until he moves on to grown-up pursuits, leaving Puff bereft.
The song, seemingly childlike in its simplicity, gained notoriety from rumours that it was about marijuana: Puff was an allusion to smoking a joint, “dragon” was code for “draggin’,” or inhaling, and Jackie Paper’s name referred to rolling papers.
Peter Yarrow performs as part of the "Voices on The Hudson" series at City Vineyard on January 12, 2020 in New York City. Photo / Getty Images
Yarrow insisted that the song was about nothing more than the loss of childhood innocence.
“Even if I had had the intention of writing a song about drugs — which I may have had at a later time — I was 20 years old at Cornell in 1959 when it was written and I was so square at that time, as was everyone else,” he told Reuters. “Drugs had not emerged then.”
Peter, Paul and Mary won five Grammy Awards, but they became known almost as much for their activism as for their music. They appeared with the Rev. Martin Luther King jnr on several occasions, performing Blowin’ in the Wind and If I Had a Hammer at the 1963 March on Washington. And they appeared at countless anti-war demonstrations, which occasionally led to death threats.
After nine years of touring and recording, the group broke up in 1970. “We didn’t plan to stop performing; we needed to,” Yarrow said in a 2014 video interview. Stookey had converted to Christianity in 1968. “His marriage and his Christian faith were the two most important things in his life,” Yarrow said, “and he felt that he could no longer honour his commitments to them and continue as a member of the group.”
Another significant factor in the split was Yarrow’s guilty plea in 1970 to a charge of taking “immoral and improper liberties” with a minor.
The minor was a 14-year-old girl who had gone to Yarrow’s room at Washington’s Shoreham Hotel in 1969 seeking an autograph. She alleged that he answered the door in the nude and made her masturbate him until he climaxed while her sister, also a minor, watched. (The sister later said she wasn’t in the room.)
At his sentencing hearing, Yarrow said the encounter was consensual. His attorney described the sisters as groupies, girls “who deliberately provoke sexual relationships with music stars”, according to a United Press International report. The judge sentenced Yarrow to one-to-three years in prison, of which he served only three months before being released. The victim’s family, meanwhile, sued Yarrow and settled for an undisclosed sum.
In 1981, Yarrow was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter. In his petition to Carter, he had written that a presidential pardon would help his young children understand that “society has forgiven their father” and might help lessen the “sense of shame that they will inevitably feel.” The petition was supported by a number of prominent politicians.
Learning of the pardon, the victim toldThe Washington Post decades later, was “like you got sucker-punched in the gut. It’s telling him, ‘It’s okay what you did, just don’t get caught next time.’”
In 2021, another woman claimed that Yarrow had lured her to his hotel room in 1969, when she was a minor, and raped her. That woman’s lawsuit was also settled privately. (Through an attorney, Yarrow declined in 2021 to answer questions posed by a Washington Post reporter about the case.)
Although Yarrow’s attorney in the 1969 case told the judge that being a known sex offender meant that his client’s singing career was over, that was not the case. He went on to record five solo albums. In 1978 he organised an antinuke rally at the Hollywood Bowl. Travers and Stookey joined him onstage, and suddenly the trio was back in business, both as singers and as activists.
They subsequently went to El Salvador and Nicaragua amid civil wars in which the US government backed right-wing elements. Yarrow said he felt compelled to witness the conflict for himself.
The group continued to perform together until Travers’ death in 2009. Mr Yarrow and Stookey later appeared as a duo.
But Yarrow suffered consequences long after his prison term and pardon, especially as the #MeToo movement against sexually abusive men took hold and past events were seen in a new light.
He became a liability to several candidates for whom he campaigned. And in 2019, a folk festival in upstate Norwich, NY, cancelled a planned appearance by Yarrow.
“I fully support the current movements demanding equal rights for all and refusing to allow continued abuse and injury — most particularly of a sexual nature, of which I am, with great sorrow, guilty,” he wrote in an email at the time.
Peter Yarrow was born in Manhattan to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants on May 31, 1938. His father, Bernard, became a lawyer at the venerable Wall Street law firm Sullivan and Cromwell. He also co-founded the National Committee for a Free Europe, an anti-Communist organisation, and became an executive with Radio Free Europe.
Yarrow’s mother, the former Vera Burtakoff, was a high school speech and drama teacher. His parents divorced when he was 5, and he did not see his father again for decades.
His mother, he told HuffPost in 2003, “was sick with the divorce and had a very serious depression afterward”. But, he said, she always made sure that there was money for violin lessons and art classes.
Yarrow studied painting at Manhattan’s High School of Music and Art. While there, he said, he learned hundreds of folk songs from other students.
He majored in psychology at Cornell University, a school he found to be deeply stratified. “If you were a person of colour, nobody would talk to you,” he said in the 2014 interview. Mr Yarrow himself felt “very marginalised.” But he took a job assisting professor Harold Thompson with his popular American folk ballads course, known around campus as “Romp-n-Stomp.”
The course included Saturday sing-alongs, led by Mr Yarrow, who saw students “transformed by the music — what was a highly segregated and hierarchical kind of vibe turned into a loving, caring, emotional, vulnerable point of view,” he said in the video interview. The course inspired him to pursue music as a career.
After graduating in 1959 he started singing in the kind of Greenwich Village clubs “where they would pass the hat”, he said. He met Grossman the following year.
In 1968, while campaigning for Democratic presidential candidate Eugene J. McCarthy, Yarrow began dating the Minnesota senator’s niece, Mary Beth McCarthy. The couple married the next year and had two children, Christopher and Bethany, before divorcing in 1991. They remarried in 2022.
He is survived by his wife and children and a grand-daughter.
