Peter Yarrow, one-third of the hit-making 1960s folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary and a Jewish activist who promoted Israeli-Palestinian coexistence and other progressive causes, died Tuesday at age 86.
The longtime resident of Manhattan’s Upper West Side entered hospice last month. The cause of death was bladder cancer.
Yarrow was a Cornell graduate playing in Greenwich Village clubs during the early 1960s folk revival when manager and musical impresario Albert Grossman, who also steered Bob Dylan’s career, suggested he team up with the Kentucky-born singer Mary Travers. Travers, in turn, proposed they include Paul Stookey.
After polishing their act at clubs in the Village like the Bitter End and the Gaslight, the trio signed with Warner and went on to record a series of hits, including folk standards like “Lemon Tree” and “500 Miles” and compositions by other revivalists, including Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer” and Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
Their debut album, “Peter, Paul and Mary,” reached Billboard magazine’s Top Ten for 10 months, including seven weeks at No. 1. They sang “If I had a Hammer” at the August 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech.”
Yarrow wrote the music for the group’s best-known composition, “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” with lyrics by his Cornell classmate Leonard Lipton. The song became a standard both at summer camps and in college dorm rooms, where the counterculture saw drug references that Yarrow always denied were there.
In 1970, Yarrow served three months in prison for taking “improper liberties” with a 14-year-old girl who came to his Washington, D.C., hotel room for an autograph. President Jimmy Carter granted a presidential pardon to Yarrow in 1981, on the last day of his presidency. Yarrow apologized for the incident, saying that “it was an era of real indiscretion and mistakes by categorically male performers. I was one of them. I got nailed. I was wrong. I’m sorry for it.”
The conviction would occasionally lead to the cancellation of concerts at which he was scheduled to appear.
The group performed regularly well after the folk revival faded. In a 1982 concert at Carnegie Hall, they first sang “Light One Candle,” Yarrow’s song about the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. Yarrow said he wrote the song (whose lyrics include “Light one candle to bind us together with peace”) to express his opposition to Israel’s war that year in Lebanon; the trio performed it the next year in Jerusalem to a large and mostly enthusiastic audience.
Yarrow was a supporter of the Israeli left-wing group Peace Now, which advocates for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2007 he traveled to Israel to promote his anti-bullying program, “Operation Respect: Don’t Laugh at Me,” in a trip sponsored by The America-Israel Friendship League.
“It is not proposing peace, but it teaches children the skills of building peace in their own lives, and that can translate into a perspective that they can bring into adulthood,” he told an interviewer.
Yarrow was born in 1938 in New York City. His mother was a high school teacher in Manhattan; his father, who emigrated from Ukraine at age 16, was a lawyer who helped create Radio Free Europe, a US propaganda channel launched during the Cold War. His parents divorced when he was five. According to Yarrow, he had no contact with his father until his mid-30s and credited his mother with instilling in him progressive values.
“What was important was learning. It was a Jewish family,” he told the Jewish Post in an interview. “There was money for education of every sort. There was money for music lessons, summer camp, and for her children, but not for jewelry or Rolex watches. She never stopped working. She was really focused on things of great importance. This is where my value system arose, and my commitment to being an activist was what she embraced.”
Yarrow attended the Interlochen music camp in Michigan, and studied physics and painting at New York’s High School of Music and Art, part of what is now LaGuardia High School. He was a physics major at Cornell before switching to psychology.
Commitment to Israel
In the Jewish Post interview, he said he remained committed to Israel despite his disappointment with its increasingly right-wing politics.
“I’m not going to stop the dialogue,” he said. “I’m going to stand up for what is wonderful about Israel and not let what I consider to be a destructive policy destroy my commitment to making Israel all that it can be, fulfilling the promise of the creation of the Jewish State. And I have the same feelings about the Palestinians.”
Yarrow’s widow, Mary Beth McCarthy, is the niece of Eugene J. McCarthy, the Minnesota senator who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968 on a platform opposing the war in Vietnam. Yarrow and Mary Beth divorced in 1991 and remarried in 2022. He is survived by her and their two children, Christopher and Bethany.
Travers died in 2009. Paul Stookey is 87.