Peter Yarrow, the singer-songwriter finest known as one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary, the folk-music group whose eloquent rhythms transfixed thousands as they lifted their voices in favour of legal rights and against battle, has died. He was 86. Yarrow, who likewise co-wrote the party’s most persistent music, Puff the Magic Dragon, died Tuesday in New York, journalist Ken Sunshine said. For the past four decades, Yarrow has had kidney cancer. Our brave dragon has reached the end of his impressive life and is exhausted. The earth knows Peter Yarrow the classic folk activist, but the human being behind the story is every bit as good, creative, passionate, lively, and clever as his lyrics suggest”, his child Bethany said in a statement. During an incredible run of victory spanning the 1960s, Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers released six Billboard Top 10 songs, two No. 1 tracks and won five Grammys. By launching the Bob Dylan enlightenment in folk songs, they also helped them advance the genre’s development by making two of his tracks, Don’t Think Double, It’s All Right, and Blowin’ in the Wind, Billboard Top 10 hits. Blowin’ in the Wind was performed by them at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his popular” I Have a Dream” statement. At the legendary Newport Folk Festival in 1965, Yarrow played both on- and off-stage functions. Yarrow was on the event table and presided over the performance, begged Dylan to return to play another track after his burning set, a scene from the 2024 biopic A Full Unknown. Dylan took Yarrow’s acoustic piano and played It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. After an eight-year break to pursue music occupations, the pair reunited in 1978 for a” Life Sunday”, an anti-nuclear-power music that Yarrow had organized in Los Angeles. They may continue to be close until Travers ‘ passing in 2009. Both Yarrow and Stookey continued to perform both independently and up. After recording their final number. 1 struck, a 1969 support of John Denver’s Leaving on a Jet Plane, the pair split up the following time to pursue music jobs. Yarrow had admitted guilt the following year to taking offensive rights with a 14-year-old woman who had asked for autographs in his motel room with her older sister. When he answered the door and let them in, the couple discovered him dressed. President Jimmy Carter pardoned Westerly in 1981 after serving three months in prison. Over the years, he apologized regularly. After being disqualified from a celebration for the statement, he told The New York Times in 2019 that he “fully supports the latest movements demanding equal rights for all and refusing to allow continued misuse and damage, especially of a sexual characteristics. I am, with great sorrow, guilty of that.” Born May 31, 1938, in New York, Yarrow was raised in an upper middle class family he said placed high value on art and scholarship. As a child, he began taking violin lessons before switching to guitar as he began to enjoy the music of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. He left Cornell University in 1959, and he soon started working as a troubled Greenwich Village musician before becoming friends with Stookey and Travers. Although he had a psychology degree, he discovered his true calling at Cornell when he was a teaching assistant for a senior class studying American folklore. He told the late record company executive Joe Smith,” I did it for the money because I wanted to wash my dishes less and play guitar more.” However, as he led the class through the song, he began to realize how powerful music could be on an audience. Through this form of folk music, he said, I saw these young people at Cornell who were essentially very conservative in their backgrounds opening their hearts up and singing with emotion and concern. After returning to New York, he met impresario Albert Grossman, who at the time was looking to put together a group that would compete with the Kingston Trio, which had a hit version of the traditional folk ballad” Tom Dooley” in 1958. Grossman said,” It gave me a clue that the world was on its way to a certain kind of movement, and that folk music might play a part in it and that I might play a part in folk music.” For the latter, Yarrow suggested a guitar-strumming Greenwich Village comic he’d seen named Noel Stookey. Trending Now
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Stookey, who would use his middle name as a member of the group, happened to be a friend of Travers, who as a teenager had performed and recorded with Pete Seeger and others. Gripped by stage fright, she was reluctant to join the pair at first, changing her mind after she heard how well her contralto voice melded with Yarrow’s tenor and Stookey’s baritone. ” We called Noel up. He was there”, Yarrow said, recalling the first time the three performed together. ” We mentioned a bunch of folk songs, which he didn’t know because he didn’t have a real folk-music background, and wound up singing Mary Had a Little Lamb. And it was immediately great, was just as clear as a bell, and we started working”.After months of rehearsal the three became an overnight sensation when their first album, 1962’s eponymous Peter, Paul and Mary, reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart. Their second, In the Wind, reached No. 4 and their third, Moving, put them back at No. 1. The trio has sung out against war and injustice on their earliest albums, including Yarrow’s own Day Is Done and Seeger’s If I Had a Hammer and Where Have All the Flowers Gone. They could also have a soft and moving side, particularly on Leonard Lipton’s Leonard Lipton novel Puff the Magic Dragon, which Yarrow had written while attending Cornell. It tells the story of Jackie Paper, a young boy who travels endlessly with his make-believe dragon friend until he defies his childhood fantasies and leaves a sobbing, heartbroken Puff behind. As Yarrow explains:” A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys” .Some insisted they heard drug references in the song, a contention at the heart of a famous scene in the film Meet the Parents, when Ben Stiller angers his girlfriend’s tightly wound father ( Robert De Niro ) by saying “puff” refers to marijuana smoke. Yarrow argued that it only reflected the loss of childhood innocence. Over the years, Yarrow continued to write and co-write songs, including the 1976 hit Torn Between Two Lovers for Mary MacGregor. For his 1979 animated film Puff the Magic Dragon, he received an Emmy nomination. Later songs include the civil rights anthem No Easy Walk to Freedom, co-written with Margery Tabankin, and Light One Candle, calling for peace in Lebanon. Yarrow, who with Travers and Stookey had supported Democratic Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential bid, met the Minnesota senator’s niece, Mary Beth McCarthy, at a campaign event. The following year, the couple wed. They had two children before divorcing. They remarried in 2022. In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by a son, Christopher, and a granddaughter, Valentina. New York correspondent for ___AP Entertainment, Mark Kennedy, contributed reporting. Rogers, the principal writer of this obituary, retired from The Associated Press in 2021. Curator Recommendations
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