Photo: Peter Yarrow | Peter Yarrow (May 31, 1938 – January 7, 2025) was an American singer and songwriter who found fame as a member of the 1960s folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary. Yarrow co-wrote (with Lenny Lipton) one of the group’s best known hits, “Puff, the Magic Dragon” (1963). He was also a political activist and supported causes that ranged from opposition to the Vietnam War to school anti-bullying programs. Yarrow was convicted in 1970 of molesting a 14-year-old girl, for which he was pardoned in 1981 by President Jimmy Carter.
Peter Yarrow was born in Manhattan on May 31, 1938, the son of Vera Wisebrode (née Vira Burtakoff) and Bernard Yarrow. His parents were educated Ukrainian Jewish immigrants whose families had settled in Providence, Rhode Island.
Peter spent the summers of 1951 and 1952 at Interlochen’s Music camp. He graduated second in his class among male students from New York’s High School of Music and Art, where he had studied painting and received a physics prize. He was accepted at Cornell University, where he began as a physics major but soon switched to psychology, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1959. Among his Cornell classmates were Lenny Lipton, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Fariña, Jack Sarfatti, and David Shetzline.
Yarrow began singing in public during his last year at Cornell while participating in Harold Thompson’s popular American Folk Literature course, colloquially known on campus as “Romp-n-Stomp”. The course was “a highlight of late-1950s student life at Cornell,” Yarrow later recalled, and singing and guitar-playing skills were prerequisites for enrollment. Thompson would lecture on a given topic for 20 or 30 minutes and afterwards a student would sing songs related to his theme. The experience of performing before a large audience was thrilling for Yarrow, who discovered he loved it. He branched out to lead community sings on weekends.
Upon graduation, Yarrow played in New York City folk clubs, appeared on the CBS television show Folk Sound USA, and performed at the Newport Folk Festival, where he met manager and musical impresario Albert Grossman. One day, the two were at Israel Young’s Folklore Center in Greenwich Village discussing Grossman’s idea for a new group that would be “an updated version of the Weavers for the baby-boom generation … with the crossover appeal of The Kingston Trio.” Yarrow noticed a picture of Mary Travers on the wall and asked Grossman who she was. “That’s Mary Travers,” Grossman said. “She’d be good if you could get her to work.” The lanky, blonde Kentucky-born Travers was well connected in Greenwich Village folk circles. While still a student at the progressive Elizabeth Irwin High School, she had been selected by Elizabeth Irwin’s chorus leader, Robert De Cormier, to join “The Song Swappers” trio in backing up Pete Seeger in the 1955 Folkways LP reissue of The Almanac Singers’ Talking Union and two other albums. In addition to performing twice with Seeger at Carnegie Hall, Travers had performed the role of a folksinger in The Next President, a short-lived Broadway play, starring satirist Mort Sahl, but she was known to be painfully introverted and loath to sing professionally.
To draw Travers out, Yarrow went to her apartment on MacDougal Street, across from The Gaslight Cafe, one of the principal folk clubs. They harmonized on ‘Miner’s Lifeguard,’ a union song, and decided that their voices blended well. To fill out the trio, Travers suggested Noel Stookey, a friend doing folk music and stand-up comedy at the Gaslight. They chose the catchy “Peter, Paul and Mary” as the name for their group, since Noel Stookey’s middle name was Paul, and rehearsed intensively for six months, touring outside New York before debuting in 1961 as a polished act at The Bitter End nightclub in Greenwich Village. There, the singers quickly developed a following and signed a contract with Warner Bros.
Warner released Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Lemon Tree” as a single in early 1962. The trio then released “If I Had a Hammer”, a 1949 song by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, written to protest the imprisonment of Harlem City Councilman Benjamin J. Davis Jr. under the Smith Act. “If I had a Hammer” garnered two Grammy Awards in 1962. The trio’s first album, the eponymous Peter, Paul & Mary, remained in the Top 10 for ten months and in the Top 20 for two years; it sold more than two million copies. The group toured extensively and recorded numerous albums, both live and in the studio.
In June 1963, Peter, Paul and Mary released a 7″ single of “Blowin’ in the Wind” by the then-relatively unknown Bob Dylan, who was also managed by Grossman. “Blowin’ in the Wind” sold 300,000 copies in the first week of release; by August 17, it was number two on the Billboard pop chart, with sales exceeding one million copies. Yarrow recalled that when he told Dylan he would make more than $5,000 (equivalent to $50,000 in 2023 from the publishing rights, Dylan was speechless. On August 28, 1963, Peter, Paul and Mary appeared on stage with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. at his historic March on Washington where their performance of “Blowin’ in the Wind” established it as a civil rights anthem. Their version also spent weeks on Billboard’s easy listening chart. By 1964 the 26-year-old Yarrow had joined the Board of the Newport Folk Festival, where he had performed as an unknown just four years earlier.
Yarrow’s songwriting helped to create some of Peter, Paul and Mary’s best-known songs, including “Puff, the Magic Dragon”, “Day Is Done”, “Light One Candle”, and “The Great Mandala”. As a member of the trio, he earned a 1996 Emmy nomination for the Great Performances special LifeLines Live, a highly acclaimed celebration of folk music, with their musical mentors, contemporaries, and a new generation of singer-songwriters.
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Yarrow died at age 86 of bladder cancer at his Upper West Side apartment on January 7, 2025, after a month in hospice care. He had battled the illness for four years.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Yarrow
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OTHER NOTABLE MUSICIANS’ DEATHS
Video Story: “Hail and Farewell”: A tribute to those we lost in 2024 || Lee Cowan remembers some of the newsworthy men and women who passed away this year – musicians and storytellers, who surpassed the ordinary, athletes who defied expectations, and activists who defied injustice, all touching us with their creativity and humanity.
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/hail-and-farewell-a-tribute-to-those-we-lost-in-2024/
Warning Signs of Suicide – National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or if you want to discuss, call the old numbers at 800-273-TALK or 800-273-8255 for English and 888-628-9454 for Spanish. Learn the signs of someone who may be contemplating suicide.
If you want to know more about any of the musicians we lost, please check them out at http://www.wikipedia.com
January 2025
9: P. Jayachandran, 80, Indian playback singer; Doc Shebeleza, 51, South African kwaito musician.
7: Ayla Erduran, 90, Turkish violinist; Winnie Khumalo, 51, South African singer and actress; Peter Yarrow, 86, American singer (Peter, Paul and Mary) and songwriter (“Puff, the Magic Dragon”), bladder cancer.
6: Stella Greka, 102, Greek singer and actress.
5: Beej Chaney, 68, American musician (The Suburbs); Fredrik Lindgren, 53, Swedish heavy metal musician (Unleashed, Terra Firma).
4: Ed Askew, 84, American painter and singer-songwriter.
3: Willem van Kooten, 83, Dutch disc jockey and entrepreneur; Árni Grétar Jóhannesson, 41, Icelandic electronic musician, injuries sustained in a traffic collision; Dashbaldangiin Purevsuren, 95, Mongolian opera singer; Peter Schaap, 78, Dutch singer and writer; Manfred Schütz, 74, German record company founder (SPV GmbH); Brenton Wood, 83, American singer (“The Oogum Boogum Song”, “Gimme Little Sign”).
2: Wilhelm Brückner, 92, German luthier; Bernie Constantin, 77, Swiss songwriter and radio show host; Russ North, 59, English heavy metal singer (Cloven Hoof); Ferdi Tayfur, 79, Turkish singer and actor.
1: Leo Dan, 82, Argentine singer, composer and actor (Story of a Poor Young Man, Cómo te extraño); Jean-Michel Defaye, 92, French composer and pianist; Chad Morgan, 91, Australian country singer and guitarist (The Sheik of Scrubby Creek); Nora Orlandi, 91, Italian musician and film composer (The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, Johnny Yuma, Clint the Stranger); Wayne Osmond, 73, American singer (The Osmonds) and songwriter (“Crazy Horses”, “Let Me In”), stroke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_in_2025
Photo: Peter Yarrow at the LBJ Presidential Library in 2016 | Photo by Marsha Miller
One, Two, Three: What Are We Fighting For? Singer/songwriter Country Joe McDonald, a Navy veteran, and folk singer Peter Yarrow, who performed with his folk group—Peter, Paul and Mary—at the huge 1969 moratorium rally in Washington, D.C. against the Vietnam War, discuss how the music of the 1960s and 1970s helped to comfort U.S. troops in Vietnam while fueling the anti-war movement at home. McDonald wrote one of the most popular Vietnam War protest songs, I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag, for his band, Country Joe and the Fish. The music discussion was moderated by Bob Santelli, executive director of the GRAMMY Museum, on Thursday, April 28, 2016, at the LBJ Presidential Library. The event was part of the library’s three-day Vietnam War Summit.
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