LOS ANGELES — Peter Yarrow, the singer-songwriter best known as one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary, the folk-music trio whose impassioned harmonies transfixed millions as they lifted their voices in favor of civil rights and against war, has died. He was 86.
Yarrow, who also co-wrote the group’s most enduring song, “Puff the Magic Dragon,” died Tuesday in New York, publicist Ken Sunshine said. Yarrow had been battling bladder cancer for the past four years.
During an incredible run of success spanning the 1960s, Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers released six Billboard Top 10 singles, two No. 1 albums and won five Grammys.
Stookey has lived in Maine for more than five decades, where he has long had a recording studio at his Blue Hill home and was a co-founder of WERU-FM, the community supported radio station in Orland. Yarrow was a frequent visitor to Maine, and regularly played concerts with Stookey and Travers and as a solo artist at venues around the state.
They also brought early exposure to Bob Dylan by turning two of his songs, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” into Billboard Top 10 hits as they helped lead an American renaissance in folk music. They performed “Blowin’ in the Wind” at the 1963 March on Washington at which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
After an eight-year hiatus to pursue solo careers, the trio reunited in 1978 for a “Survival Sunday,” an anti-nuclear-power concert that Yarrow had organized in Los Angeles. They would remain together until Travers’ death in 2009. Upon her passing, Yarrow and Stookey continued to perform both separately and together.
Story by John Rogers, Associated Press. Rogers, the principal writer of this obituary, retired from The Associated Press in 2021.
BDN writer Emily Burnham contributed to this report.
