Peter Yarrow, who helped make folk music a pop phenomenon in the 1960s as one-third of the vocal trio Peter, Paul and Mary, died Tuesday at his home in New York. He was 86.
His death was confirmed by his publicist, Ken Sunshine, who said the cause was bladder cancer.
Yarrow was the tenor in Peter, Paul and Mary, his tender and attentive vocals sandwiched between the soothing baritone of Noel Paul Stookey and the airy contralto of Mary Travers. He co-wrote and sang lead on one of the group’s biggest commercial hits, “Puff the Magic Dragon,” which he based on a poem by Leonard Lipton and which reached No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1963.
Among the trio’s other well-known tunes were their richly harmonized renditions of Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song),” Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” — which they performed at the famous March on Washington, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech — and John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” which topped the Hot 100 in 1969.
Yarrow’s death leaves Stookey as the sole surviving member of Peter, Paul and Mary; Travers died in 2009 at 72.
Peter, Paul and Mary used their pop success to draw attention to a litany of progressive political causes, including peace and civil rights. Yet Yarrow also spent three months in jail in 1970 for an incident of sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old girl — a crime for which he was later pardoned by President Carter, who died last month at 100.
This story will be updated.
