Peter Yarrow.
Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Pictures
Peter Yarrow, the Peter of people trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, died on January 7. He was 86. Yarrow died at residence in Manhattan from bladder most cancers, which he had for the previous 4 years, the New York Occasions reviews. Yarrow started performing within the downtown New York people scene within the late Nineteen Fifties after graduating from Cornell. He met his collaborator Mary Travers by these exhibits, who launched him to Noel Paul Stookey, who glided by his center identify Paul of their group. Peter, Paul, and Mary rapidly turned one of the profitable people acts of the Nineteen Sixties; their 1962 debut album went double platinum and their recording of “If I Had a Hammer” gained two Grammys. Their efficiency of Bob Dylan’s early track “Don’t Suppose Twice, It’s Alright” is credited with boosting Dylan’s early album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Yarrow sang lead on the group’s most enduring hit, “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” tailored from a poem by his Cornell classmate Leonard Lipton. Like different people teams of the period, Peter, Paul, and Mary had been politically energetic, performing on the 1963 March on Washington and opposing the Vietnam Battle.
Peter, Paul, and Mary broke up in 1970, after 9 albums. Like his bandmates, Yarrow meant to pursue a solo profession, however he had pleaded responsible to sexually molesting a 14-year-old fan the yr prior. He served three months of a one-to-three-year sentence in 1970, and was later pardoned by late president Jimmy Carter in 1981. The fan, Barbara Winter, later confirmed Yarrow had abused her on different situations, and in 2021, one other lady sued Yarrow for allegedly raping her as a minor additionally in 1969.
Yarrow, in the meantime, launched 4 solo albums within the early Seventies, earlier than Peter, Paul, and Mary reunited in 1978. Travers died in 2009, making Stookey now the only surviving member of the group.