Peter Yarrow
Biography and cause of death of 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.
Peter 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 Early life and family
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.
Bernard Yarrow (1899–1973) attended the Jagiellonian University (Kraków) and the Odesa University (Odesa) before emigrating to the United States in 1922, at age 23. He anglicized his surname from Yaroshevitz to Yarrow, obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in 1925 from Columbia University, where he joined Phi Sigma Delta fraternity, and graduated from Columbia Law School in 1928.
He then maintained a private law practice in New York City until 1938, when he was appointed an assistant district attorney under Thomas E. Dewey. In 1944, he was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services, where he served with distinction.
After the war, Bernard joined Sullivan & Cromwell, the Dulles brothers’ law firm. He was a founding board member of the National Committee for a Free Europe, an anti-Communist organization. In 1952, he became a senior vice-president of the CIA-funded Radio Free Europe, an organization he helped found.
Yarrow’s mother, Vera (1904–1991), who had come to America at age three, became a speech and drama teacher at New York’s Julia Richman Education Complex for girls. She and Bernard divorced in 1943, when their son Peter was five, and Vera subsequently married Harold Wisebrode, the executive director of the Central Synagogue in Manhattan. Bernard married his wartime London OSS partner Silvia Tim, and converted to Protestantism.
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.
Peter Yarrow Music career
Peter Yarrow at the LBJ Presidential Library in 2016
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’ The 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 Brothers.
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.
Peter Yarrow was instrumental in founding the New Folks Concert series at both the Newport Folk Festival and the Kerrville Folk Festival.[20] His work at Kerrville has been called his “most important achievement in this arena”.
Peter Yarrow co-wrote and produced “Torn Between Two Lovers”, a number one hit for Mary McGregor. He also produced three CBS TV specials based on “Puff, the Magic Dragon”, which earned an Emmy nomination for him. In 1978 Yarrow organized Survival Sunday, an antinuclear benefit, and after a period of separation, he was once again joined by Stookey and Travers.
Peter Yarrow and his daughter, Bethany Yarrow, often performed together. Together with cellist Rufus Cappadocia, they formed the trio Peter, Bethany, and Rufus. They released the CD Puff & Other Family Classics. In 2008, the musical special Peter, Bethany & Rufus: Spirit of Woodstock, featuring a live performance of the band, aired on public television.
Peter Yarrow portrayed leftist intellectual Ira Mandelstam in the 2015 film While We’re Young.
Peter Yarrow Social activism
Yarrow had long been an activist for social and political causes. What he did was not always popular. According to The New York Times:
As their fame grew, Peter, Paul and Mary mixed music with political and social activism. The trio marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, D.C., in 1963 and in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. The three participated in countless demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. They sang at the 1969 March on Washington, which Mr. Yarrow helped to organize.
Though their activism provoked a steady stream of death threats, they were never harmed. “But for years, I used to bite my fingernails on stage,” [Mary] Travers says. “There you are and look like the back porch light, and stare out at 12,000 or 15,000 people. Any one of whom could have had a gun.”
Peter Yarrow Operation Respect
Yarrow in 2008
In 2000, in an effort to combat school bullying, Yarrow helped start Operation Respect, a nonprofit organization that brings to children, in schools and camps, a curriculum of tolerance and respect for each other’s differences. The project began as a result of Yarrow and his daughter Bethany and his son Christopher having heard the song Don’t Laugh at Me (written by Steve Seskin and Allen Shamblin) at the Kerrville Folk Festival.
In March 2008, Yarrow told Reuters:
Operation Respect has been my main and all-consuming work for the past 10 years. My perception is that the kind of bullying, humiliation that goes on in children’s schools leads to high rates of depression that was virtually unknown when I was young and the high suicide rate of teenagers which we know is almost inevitably caused by bullying or mean-spiritedness. It is a reflection of the role models that young people observe on TV shows like a lot of the reality shows. It is also part and parcel of the characteristics in the adult world of America.
Peter Yarrow Other activism
Yarrow’s leadership in the campaign to free Soviet Jewry inspired another generation. Of the song “Light One Candle”, Rabbi Allison Bergman Vann wrote:{{blockquote|Peter Yarrow’s now famous song, which was written in 1983, became a defining song for my generation of high school and college students to become activists, to make the world a better place.
I heard Peter Yarrow singing that song on the steps of the Capitol, in 1987, twenty years ago next week, during the march to free Soviet Jews. Listening to him sing, surrounded by literally thousands of like-minded individuals, I learned of my obligation to change the world; to engage in tikkun olam, repair of our broken world. And, during that incredible day, I knew that we could, indeed, change the world.
In 2005, Yarrow performed in Ho Chi Minh City at a concert to benefit the Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange; Yarrow pleaded with the Vietnamese for forgiveness of the United States.
Peter Yarrow served on the board of directors of the Connecticut Hospice.
On 1 November 2008, Yarrow performed across New York City for volunteers who worked for the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama.
On 3 October 2011, Yarrow, his son, and his daughter made an appearance at Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street protests, playing songs such as “We Shall Not Be Moved” and a variation of “Puff the Magic Dragon”.
Peter Yarrow was a member of Braver Angels.
Peter Yarrow Personal life
Peter Yarrow cited Judaism as one of the roots of his liberal views.
While campaigning for 1968 presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, Yarrow met McCarthy’s niece, Mary Beth McCarthy, in Wisconsin. He was 31, she was 20. They were married in October 1969 in Willmar, Minnesota. Paul Stookey wrote “Wedding Song (There Is Love)” as his gift for their wedding and first performed it at St. Mary’s Church in Willmar.
They had two children, son Christopher and daughter Bethany, but later divorced. At the time of Yarrow’s death, it was revealed that he and Mary Beth remarried in 2022 and remained married until his death in 2025.
In December 2000, Yarrow’s Larrivee acoustic guitar was stolen on an airplane flight. In early 2005, fans spotted the guitar on eBay. The FBI recovered it in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, and returned it to Yarrow. He did not press charges, as the person from whom it was recovered was not the person who had stolen it.
Peter Yarrow performed the world premiere of “The Colonoscopy Song” on the CBS early morning program The Early Show on March 9, 2010.
Peter Yarrow acknowledged being an alcoholic, and sought treatment for the disease. He considered himself in recovery.
A longtime resident of New York City, Yarrow had also owned a vacation home in Telluride, Colorado. Yarrow’s son, Christopher, is a visual artist who in the late 2000s owned an emporium in Portland, Oregon, named The Monkey & The Rat.
Peter Yarrow Criminal conviction and pardon
In 1970, Yarrow was convicted and served three months in prison for taking “improper liberties” with 14-year-old Barbara Winter. In August 1969, she had gone with her 17-year-old sister to Yarrow’s hotel room in Washington, DC seeking an autograph. Winter stated that Yarrow answered the door naked and made her masturbate him until he ejaculated. Yarrow served three months of a 1–3 year prison sentence.
He 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.”
Peter Yarrow was granted a presidential pardon by Jimmy Carter on January 19, 1981, the day before Carter’s presidency ended. For decades, Yarrow avoided mention of the assault, but by the early 2000s, it became a campaign issue for politicians he supported.
In 2004, U.S. Representative Martin Frost of Texas, a Democrat, canceled a fundraising appearance with Yarrow after his opponent ran a radio advertisement about Yarrow’s offense; in 2013, Republican politicians in New York called on Democratic congressional candidate Martha Robertson to cancel a scheduled fundraiser with Yarrow. In 2019, he was disinvited from a folk music festival when the organizers were informed of his conviction.
In May 2021, The Washington Post wrote that “[Yarrow’s] pardon by Carter — perhaps the only one in U.S. history wiping away a conviction for a sexual offense against a child — escaped scrutiny when it happened. It was granted just hours before the American hostages in Iran were freed, which captured headlines for weeks.” The same article details other allegations of sexual assault of minors made against Yarrow, including the alleged rape of another teenage girl.
Peter Yarrow Death
Peter Yarrow died of bladder cancer on January 7, 2025, at his Upper West Side apartment, at the age of 86.
Peter Yarrow Awards and honors
Yarrow received the Allard K. Lowenstein Award in 1982 for his “remarkable efforts in advancing the causes of human rights, peace, and freedom”. In 1995 the Miami Jewish Federation recognized Yarrow’s continual efforts by awarding its Tikkun Olam Award for his part in helping to “repair the world”.
Peter Yarrow was awarded the Kate Wolf Memorial Award by the World Folk Music Association in 1993.
In 2003 a congressional resolution recognized Yarrow’s achievements and those of Operation Respect.
Source: Wikipedia