Peter Yarrow of Folk-Music Trio Peter, Paul and Mary Dies at 86

“I saw these young people at Cornell who were basically very conservative in their backgrounds opening their hearts up and singing with an emotionality and a concern through this vehicle called folk music,” he 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.”

Soon after returning to New York, he met impresario Albert Grossman, who would go on to manage Dylan, Janis Joplin and others and who at the time was looking to put together a group that would rival the Kingston Trio, which in 1958 had a hit version of the traditional folk ballad “Tom Dooley.”

But Grossman wanted a trio with a female singer and a member who could be funny enough to keep an audience engaged with comic patter. For the latter, Yarrow suggested a guitar-strumming Greenwich Village comic he’d seen named Noel Stookey.

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.

Mary Travers, Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow of the folk group "Peter, Paul & Mary" pose for a portrait in 1965.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

From their earliest albums, the trio sang out against war and injustice in songs like Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have all the Flowers Gone,” Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “When the Ship Comes In” and Yarrow’s own “Day is Done.”

They could also show a soft and poignant side, particularly on “Puff the Magic Dragon,” which Yarrow had written during his Cornell years with college friend Leonard Lipton.

It tells the tale of Jackie Paper, a young boy who embarks on countless adventures with his make-believe dragon friend until he outgrows such 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 maintained it reflected the loss of childhood innocence and nothing more.

After recording their last No. 1 hit, a 1969 cover of John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” the trio split up the following year to pursue solo careers.

That same year Yarrow had pleaded guilty to taking indecent liberties with a 14-year-old girl who had come to his hotel room with her older sister to ask for autographs. The pair found him naked when he answered the door and let them in. Yarrow, who resumed his career after serving three months in jail, was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1981. Over the decades, he apologized repeatedly.

“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 told The New York Times in 2019 after being disinvited from a festival over the sentence.

Over the years, Yarrow continued to write and co-write songs, including the 1976 hit “Torn Between Two Lovers” for Mary MacGregor. He received an Emmy nomination in 1979 for the animated film “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

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 couple married the following year. They had two children before divorcing.

In addition to his ex-wife and daughter, he is survived by a son, Christopher, and a granddaughter, Valentina.