Peter Yarrow Folk Music Icon, Activist, child molester dies

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Folk singer Peter Yarrow — writer of the timeless classic "Puff the Magic Dragon" and one-third of the legendary 1960s trio Peter, Paul and Mary — died Tuesday, a family representative said.

He was 86.

Yarrow died in New York City, publicist Ken Sunshine confirmed to NBC News, years after a bladder cancer diagnosis.

“Our fearless dragon is tired and has entered the last chapter of his magnificent life. The world knows Peter Yarrow the iconic folk activist, but the human being behind the legend is every bit as generous, creative, passionate, playful, and wise as his lyrics suggest,” daughter Bethany Yarrow said in a statement.

Yarrow's death follows the 2009 passing of 72-year-old Mary Travers, leaving Noel Paul Stookey, 87, as the last surviving member of Peter, Paul and Mary.

The trio's songs were part of the soundtrack for the civil rights movement and Yarrow co-wrote the group’s most enduring song, “Puff the Magic Dragon,” based on a poem by the late Lenny Lipton.

Stookey said growing up as an only child, he never knew what it was like to have a brother until meeting Yarrow. They were best men at each other's weddings.

"He was a loving ‘uncle’ to my three daughters. And, while his comfort in the city and my love of the country tended to keep us apart geographically, our different perspectives were celebrated often in our friendship and our music," Stookey said in a statement.

Yarrow is survived by his wife Marybeth, son Christopher, daughter Bethany and granddaughter Valentina.

Peter Yarrow, a major figure of the Sixties folk revival with Peter, Paul and Mary who was convicted of molesting a 14-year-old girl and later received a presidential pardon, died today, The New York Times reports. He was 86.

Yarrow died from bladder cancer at his home in Manhattan. His death was confirmed by his publicist, Ken Sunshine.

Yarrow had reportedly been battling bladder cancer for several years. Recently, his children, Bethany and Christopher Yarrow, set up a “living tribute” for their father on his website, asking fans, friends, and others to submit short messages, photos, or videos in Yarrow’s honor. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and folk singer Mary Chapin Carpenter were among those who contributed tributes.

With their distinctive three-part harmonies, Peter, Paul and Mary — with Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers — became one of the biggest and most commercially successful acts to emerge out of the Greenwich Village folk scene. The group won five Grammys, released two Number One albums, and scored six Top 10 hits, including a 1962 rendition of Pete Seeger and Lee Hays’ “If I Had a Hammer,” a 1963 version of Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and a 1969 take on John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” which reached Number One.

Born May 31, 1938, Yarrow was raised in Manhattan and attended Cornell, where he first began singing folk songs and graduated with a degree in psychology. Yarrow, who first played violin before switching to guitar, also taught a course in folk at Cornell.

“That’s the real reason I entered the folk field, because in that class I saw the transformational power folk music had,” he told Westword in 2015. “It was a very, very backward time in our country, and certainly on the Ivy League campuses. When the kids at the college took this course, their humanity emerged, and it was palatable and clear. I was in tune with the fact that the world was going to go through a big change and that folk music was going to become an important part of it. It became the soundtrack of that change.

As part of the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, he met Albert Grossman, the enigmatic manager and festival co-organizer. Grossman began working with Yarrow, who started singing in Greenwich Village clubs (especially the Cafe Wha?), performed at the 1960 Newport festival, and was included in a CBS News special on folk music. In 1961, Grossman approached Yarrow with the idea of putting together a folk trio modeled on the Weavers but for a new, Sixties generation.

Grossman, in search of a female member and comedian for the group, soon recruited Travers and Stookey, and Peter, Paul and Mary was hatched. “I had a very strong sense of purpose at that time, and Noel and Mary did not,” Yarrow told Rolling Stone in 2009. “Mary never believed this would go much further than a year or something. Noel also was doing it on a temporary basis. But I had a different concept. Our voices, singing the way we were singing … I felt that we were carrying on a tradition that would be very important in terms of what was happening in the world. I really felt that we had something important to share. It’s like when you fall in love right away and say, ‘I’m going to marry this person!’ That’s what I said in my heart.”

While traditional songs and adaptations comprised the bulk of Peter, Paul and Mary’s catalog, they occasionally wrote originals. Yarrow was behind some of their biggest like their 1969 anti-war number “Day Is Done” and his most significant contribution, 1963’s “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” Based on a poem by Leonard Lipton (a classmate of Yarrow’s at Cornell University), the bittersweet tune about a child who eventually grows out of his need for his imaginary dragon friend peaked at Number Two on the Billboard Hot 100, and became a modern standard and cultural touchstone.

Peter, Paul and Mary were also deeply involved in some of the biggest social and political movements of the Sixties. They performed during Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington, as well as during the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965. Speaking of the former, Yarrow told Rolling Stone in 2009, “It was so incredibly powerful, that moment. Washington was a segregated city at that time. Different water fountains for Blacks and whites. Here we were in our nation’s capitol, where we proclaimed with others that there was liberty and justice for all. Mary later told me, ‘Do you remember when we were standing there listening to the [King] speech? I took your hand, and I said, ‘Peter, we are watching history being made.””

During the 1968 presidential election, Yarrow campaigned for democrat Eugene McCarthy. He would later look back on that time, also the year of King’s and Robert Kennedy’s assassinations, as a turning point for America. “That was the end of a kind of momentum we could have had,” he told author David Browne in the 2011 book Fire and Rain. “1968 signaled the very un-happy reality that the social movement lost the possibility of being a dominant political force.”

While on the campaign trail that year, though, Yarrow met McCarthy’s niece, Mary Beth McCarthy, whom he married a year later. (Mary Beth was 20 when they met, Yarrow was 31; they had two children and eventually divorced.) Yarrow also helped organize several peace concerts in opposition to the Vietnam War, including a 1969 march on Washington and the Festival for Peace at Shea Stadium in New York City in August 1970 (with a lineup of Paul Simon, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Miles Davis, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and others). Facing a rowdy audience at the latter, who were more interested in partying than activism, Yarrow attempted to calm the crowd down with a rendition of “Puff the Magic Dragon” and broke down at the sight of gatecrashers.

That same year, however, Yarrow found himself in a Washington, D.C., courthouse pleading guilty to taking “immoral and improper liberties” with a child. A 14-year-old girl named Barbara Winter claimed that Yarrow had invited her and her 17-year-old sister to meet him at his hotel room. He answered the door naked and made Winter masturbate him until he ejaculated while her sister watched.

“It happened when I was just an innocent child,” Winter told The Washington Post in 2021. “I didn’t know anything. I was just a little girl that liked to play with her friends.”

During the court hearings in his criminal case, Yarrow tried to argue that Winter was a willing participant in the incident. At his sentencing, the folk singer’s lawyer reportedly called the Winter sisters “groupies,” while stating that Yarrow was seeking psychological treatment and that his condition had improved since his marriage to McCarthy. The singer ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced to one-to-three years in prison, but the judge suspended most of it. He ended up serving less than three months, securing an early release on Nov. 25, 1970, so he could be home for Thanksgiving.

“It was an era of real indiscretion and mistakes by categorically male performers,” Yarrow once said. “I was one of them. I got nailed. I was wrong. I’m sorry for it.”

Winter’s parents also brought a civil suit against Yarrow, which they eventually settled. In the suit, they claimed that the singer had seduced Winter’s older sister, Kathie Berkel, as well, starting when she was 14. (In that 2021 Post story, Berkel called these claims “lies.” She also cast doubt on Winter’s own allegations, saying, “I can’t say for sure [what happened], because I wasn’t in the room … she was in the room by herself with him for five minutes, and I was right outside.”)

Just over a decade later, Yarrow received a presidential pardon from Jimmy Carter, who granted the musician’s request on the last day of his term, Jan. 19, 1981. (The following day, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated and the news was flooded with reports of the hostages from the U.S. embassy in Iran finally coming home.) In his pardon application, Yarrow described his abuse of Winter as “the most terrible mistake I have ever made,” and said he sought the pardon so he would be better able to explain the incident to his children.

“It is my hope they will see a balanced picture, one that understands that their daddy did something very wrong but also one that asserts that their daddy has also done much for society to eliminate want and inequality where he saw it,” Yarrow wrote at the time. When Winter’s mother heard of the pardon, she reportedly started shouting, “He got away with it! He got away with it!”

Additional allegations against Yarrow would surface decades later. In 2021, an anonymous woman sued Yarrow under New York’s Child Victims Act, which offered victims of child abuse a new window to take legal action against their alleged abusers. The woman claimed that in 1969, while still a minor, she ran away from her home in Minnesota and traveled to New York to meet Yarrow at a hotel, where he raped her. Yarrow allegedly sent her back home with a plane ticket the next morning. (A settlement in the case was reached a few months after it was filed.)

Then, in its 2021 exposé, The Washington Post uncovered a wire report in a Cincinnati newspaper about Yarrow’s 1970 conviction that included an additional note claiming a “similar charge” against the folk singer was “ignored” by a local grand jury three years prior. A father had signed a complaint accusing Yarrow of taking “indecent liberties” with his 15-year-old daughter when Yarrow was in town for a concert in 1967. The father said Yarrow “fondled his daughter when she went to his dressing room seeking his autograph.”

Winter, speaking of her own experience in that Post story, said: “What you carry with you for the rest of your life — it never goes away,” she said. “Despite what people think, it doesn’t go away. You block it out because you’re forced to. You have no other choice but to block it out.”

Peter, Paul and Mary disbanded in 1970, with the three embarking on solo careers, though they did occasionally reunite, like a concert in support of McGovern’s ’72 campaign. Yarrow released four solo albums during the Seventies, and while none were huge hits, he did score a Number One single in 1976 when he co-wrote and co-produced “Torn Between Two Lovers” for Mary MacGregor. Yarrow was also closely involved in three animated TV specials based on “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” which aired on CBS in 1978, 1978, and 1982.

Yarrow remained politically and socially engaged, too: He co-founded a nonprofit focused on anti-bullying and childhood education in 1999, played at inaugural events for Bill Clinton in the Nineties and at Occupy Wall Street in the 2010s, and continued to campaign with Democratic politicians — though this occasionally caused problems as Republicans seized on Yarrow’s child sex abuse conviction.

Over the decades, Yarrow’s conviction was largely ignored in the public sphere. On the occasions he was asked about it, he expressed regret and remorse, while also standing by his pardon. “You don’t get a presidential pardon if you’re not doing great work, have paid your debts to society,” he reportedly told the Baltimore Jewish Times in 2006 (via The Post).

In 2019, amidst the #MeToo movement, organizers removed Yarrow from the lineup of a New York folk festival after the allegations against him resurfaced. In response, Yarrow said he fully supported “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 continued: “I do not seek to minimize or excuse what I have done, and I cannot adequately express my apologies and sorrow for the pain and injury I have caused in this regard. However, beyond any of my words and feelings expressed, I will walk the walk, do all I can to make amends, and dedicate myself to helping bring more justice and peace to the world.”