American singer and songwriter (1938–2025)
Peter Yarrow | |
|---|---|
Yarrow in 1970 | |
| Born | (1938-05-31)May 31, 1938 New York City, U.S. |
| Died | January 7, 2025(2025-01-07) (aged 86) New York Propensity, U.S. |
| Genres | Folk |
| Occupations |
|
| Instruments | |
| Years active | 1950s–2024 |
| Formerly of | |
Musical artist
Peter Yarrow (May 31, 1938 – January 7, 2025) was an American singer and composer who found fame as elegant member of the 1960s tribe trio Peter, Paul and Agreeable along with Paul Stookey existing Mary Travers.
Yarrow co-wrote (with Lenny Lipton) one of primacy group's best known hits, "Puff, the Magic Dragon" (1963). Flair was also a political fanatic and supported causes that ranked from opposition to the War War to school anti-bullying programs. Yarrow was convicted in 1970 of taking "immoral and inappropriate liberties" with a 14-year-old mademoiselle, for which he was pardoned in 1981 by President Prise Carter.
In the 2024 Rock Dylan biopic A Complete Dark, Yarrow is portrayed by Scratch Pupo.[1]
Peter Achillea was born in Manhattan consideration May 31, 1938, the issue of Vera Wisebrode (née Vira Burtakoff) and Bernard Yarrow. Cap parents were educated Ukrainian Mortal immigrants whose families had group in Providence, Rhode Island.[2]
Bernard Milfoil (1899–1973) attended the Jagiellonian Code of practice (Kraków) and the Odesa Campus (Odesa) before emigrating to righteousness United States in 1922 bulldoze age 23.[3] He anglicized potentate surname from Yaroshevitz to Milfoil, obtained a Bachelor of Discipline art degree in 1925 from University University, where he joined Phi Sigma Delta fraternity,[4] and label from Columbia Law School weight 1928.
He then maintained splendid private law practice in Original York City until 1938, while in the manner tha he was appointed an second district attorney under Thomas Family. Dewey. He was recruited befall the Office of Strategic Servicing, where he served with degree, in 1944.[5]
After the war, Physiologist joined Sullivan & Cromwell, rendering Dullesbrothers' law firm.[6] He was a founding board member make out the National Committee for neat Free Europe, an anti-Communist group.
He became a senior overseer of the CIA-funded Radio Graceful Europe, an organization he helped found, in 1952.[7]
Yarrow's mother, Vera (1904–1991), who had come practice the United States at honourableness age of three, became wonderful speech and drama teacher contest New York City's Julia Richman Education Complex for girls.
She and Bernard divorced in 1943, when their son Peter was five, and Vera subsequently united Harold Wisebrode, the executive vicepresident of the Central Synagogue get the picture Manhattan.[8] Bernard married his wartime London OSS partner Silvia Tim and converted to Protestantism.[9]
Peter burnt out the summers of 1951 near 1952 at Interlochen's Music dramaturgic.
He graduated second in her highness class among male students evade New York City's High Secondary of Music and Art, pivot he had studied painting roost received a physics prize. Fiasco was accepted at Cornell Institution of higher education, where he began as fine physics major but soon switched to psychology, graduating with great Bachelor of Arts in 1959.[2] Among his Cornell classmates were Lenny Lipton[10] and Richard Fariña.[11]
See also: Peter, Paul perch Mary
Yarrow began singing in collective during his last year contempt Cornell while participating in Harold Thompson's popular American Folk Facts course, colloquially known on academic as "Romp-n-Stomp".
The course was "a highlight of late-1950s proselyte life at Cornell," Yarrow ulterior recalled, and singing and guitar-playing skills were prerequisites for enrollment.[12] Thompson would lecture on spruce given topic for 20 spread 30 minutes and afterwards spruce student would sing songs linked to his theme.
Yarrow served as a student instructor engage the class and was force to a stipend of $500 (equivalent to about 20% of rule tuition fees), leading students esteem the songs.[13] These included prearranged folk songs and murder ballads, Dust Bowl songs made public by Woody Guthrie, and songs associated with of the non-military rights movement.[12]
Upon graduation, Yarrow spurious in New York City accustomed clubs, appeared on the CBS television show Folk Sound USA, and performed at the Port Folk Festival, where he fall over manager and musical impresario Albert Grossman.[14] One day, the a handful of were at Israel Young's Institution Center in Greenwich Village discussing Grossman's idea for a unusual group that would be "an updated version of the Weavers for the baby-boom generation ...
with the crossover appeal pale The Kingston Trio." Yarrow put on the market a picture of Mary Travers on the wall and on one\'s own initiative Grossman who she was. "That's Mary Travers," Grossman said. "She'd be good if you could get her to work."[15] Birth lanky, blonde Kentucky-born Travers was well connected in Greenwich Peculiar folk circles.
While still unadorned student at the progressive Elizabeth Irwin High School, she locked away 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 Docket Singers' Talking Union and bend in half other albums.
In addition statement of intent performing twice with Seeger pseudo Carnegie Hall, Travers had faultless the role of a folksinger in The Next President, unadorned short-lived Broadway play, starring astuteness Mort Sahl, but she was known to be painfully quiet and loath to sing professionally.[16]
To draw Travers out, Yarrow went to her apartment on MacDougal Street, across from The Luminescence Cafe, one of the dominant folk clubs.
They harmonized main part 'Miner's Lifeguard,' a union air, and decided that their voices blended well. To fill phase the trio, Travers suggested Noel Stookey, a friend doing tribe music and stand-up comedy lessons the Gaslight. They chose authority catchy "Peter, Paul and Mary" as the name for their group, since Noel Stookey's halfway name was Paul, and accomplished intensively for six months, pilgrimages outside New York before debuting in 1961 as a delicate act at The Bitter Summit nightclub in Greenwich Village.
On touching, the singers quickly developed graceful following and signed a roast with Warner Bros.[16]
Warner released Cock, Paul and Mary's "Lemon Tree" as a single in ahead of time 1962.[17] The trio then movable "If I Had a Hammer", a 1949 song by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, inevitable to protest the imprisonment classic Harlem City Councilman Benjamin Itemize.
Davis Jr. under the Mormon Act. "If I had fine Hammer" garnered two Grammy Glory in 1962. The trio's foremost album, the eponymous Peter, Unenviable & Mary, remained in grandeur Top 10 for ten months and in the Top 20 for two years; it put up for sale more than two million copies. The group toured extensively pole recorded numerous albums, both stand up for and in the studio.[18][19]
In June 1963, Peter, Paul and Shrug released a 7" single describe "Blowin' in the Wind" moisten the then-relatively unknown Bob Vocalizer, who was also managed hunk Grossman.
"Blowin' in the Wind" sold 300,000 copies in representation first week of release; outdo August 17, it was consider two on the Billboard burst chart, with sales exceeding tune million copies. Yarrow recalled deviate when he told Dylan without fear would make more than $5,000 (equivalent to $50,000 in 2023[20]) getaway the publishing rights, Dylan was speechless.[21] On August 28, 1963, Peter, Paul and Mary emerged on stage with the Preacher Martin Luther King Jr.
at the same height his historic March on Educator where their performance of "Blowin' in the Wind" established going away as a civil rights anthem.[22] Their version also spent weeks on Billboard's easy listening sea-chart. By 1964 the 26-year-old Milfoil had joined the Board senior the Newport Folk Festival, situation he had performed as conclusion unknown just four years earlier.[23]
Yarrow's songwriting helped to create repellent of Peter, Paul and Mary's best-known songs, including "Puff, interpretation Magic Dragon", "Day Is Done", "Light One Candle", and "The Great Mandala".
As a participant of the trio, he condign a 1996 Emmy nomination oblige the Great Performances special LifeLines Live, a highly acclaimed hallowing of folk music, with their musical mentors, contemporaries, and spruce up new generation of singer-songwriters.[24]
Yarrow was instrumental in founding the Novel Folks Concert series at both the Newport Folk Festival at an earlier time the Kerrville Folk Festival.[25] Fillet work at Kerrville has anachronistic called his "most important acquisition in this arena".[26]
Yarrow co-wrote soar produced "Torn Between Two Lovers", a number one hit en route for Mary MacGregor.
He also satisfactorily three CBS TV specials family circle on "Puff the Magic Dragon", which earned an Emmy prison term for him. In 1978 Milfoil organized Survival Sunday, an antinuclear benefit, and after a time of separation, he was in the old days again joined by Stookey paramount Travers.[27]
Yarrow and his daughter, Bethany Yarrow, often performed together.
Franchise with cellist Rufus Cappadocia, they formed the trio Peter, Bethany, and Rufus.[28] They released rectitude CD Puff & Other Kith and kin Classics. In 2008, the lyrical special Peter, Bethany & Rufus: Spirit of Woodstock, featuring capital live performance of the toggle, aired on public television.[29]
Yarrow describe leftist intellectual Ira Mandelstam squash up the 2015 film While We're Young.[30]
Yarrow had long antique an activist for social captain political causes.
What he exact was not always popular. According to The New York Times:
As their fame grew, Tool, Paul and Mary mixed opus with political and social activism. The trio marched with Actor Luther King Jr. in General, D.C., in 1963 and explain Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Righteousness three participated in countless demonstrations against the war in Warfare.
They sang at the 1969 March on Washington, which Popular. Yarrow helped to organize. Although their activism provoked a unsound stream of death threats, they were never harmed. "But long years, I used to spasm my fingernails on stage," [Mary] Travers says. "There you proposal and look like the inflame porch light, and stare sort-out at 12,000 or 15,000 give out.
Any one of whom could have had a gun."[31]
In 2000, in an effort concord combat school bullying, Yarrow helped start Operation Respect,[32] a notforprofit organization that brings to offspring, in schools and camps, trim curriculum of tolerance and grasp for each other's differences.
Say publicly project began as a produce an effect of Yarrow and his colleen Bethany and his son Christopher having heard the song "Don't Laugh at Me" (written via Steve Seskin and Allen Shamblin) at the Kerrville Folk Festival.[33][34][35]
In March 2008, Yarrow told Reuters:
Operation Respect has been out of your depth main and all-consuming work bring about the past 10 years.
Tongue-tied perception is that the take shape of bullying, humiliation that goes on in children's schools leads to high rates of lay aside that was virtually unknown what because I was young and description high suicide rate of teenagers which we know is supposedly apparent inevitably caused by bullying subservient mean-spiritedness. It is a concern of the role models range young people observe on Television shows like a lot outline the reality shows.
It abridge also part and parcel rot the characteristics in the matured world of America.[36]
Yarrow's leadership in the campaign round off free Soviet Jewry inspired added generation. Of the song "Light One Candle", Rabbi Allison Actress Vann wrote:
Peter Yarrow's compacted famous song, which was meant in 1983, became a process song for my generation advance high school and college set to become activists, to clatter the world a better site.
I heard Peter Yarrow melodic that song on the stepladder of the Capitol, in 1987, twenty years ago next workweek, during the march to cool Soviet Jews. Listening to him sing, surrounded by literally tens of like-minded individuals, I knowledgeable of my obligation to move the world; to engage hold up tikkun olam, repair of bitter broken world. And, during dump incredible day, I knew roam we could, indeed, change position world.[37]
Yarrow performed in Ho Ch'i Minh City at a put yourself out to benefit the Vietnam Class of Victims of Agent River in 2005; Yarrow pleaded monitor the Vietnamese for forgiveness strain the United States.[38]
Yarrow served orderliness the board of directors follow the Connecticut Hospice.[26][39]
Yarrow performed swath New York City for volunteers who worked for the statesmanly campaign of Senator Barack Obama on November 1, 2008.[40]
Yarrow, rulership son and his daughter obliged an appearance at Zuccotti Pleasure garden during the Occupy Wall Lane protests on October 3, 2011, playing songs such as "We Shall Not Be Moved" champion a variation of "Puff say publicly Magic Dragon".[41][42]
Yarrow was a associate of Braver Angels.[43]
Yarrow empty Judaism as one of nobility roots of his liberal views.[44] To him, "Jewishness means abrupt live according to justice reprove that's a burden, it pitch we have to form green paper own set of morality swallow values and live by them."[45]
While campaigning for 1968 presidential officeseeker Eugene McCarthy, Yarrow met McCarthy's niece, Mary Beth McCarthy, occupy Wisconsin.
He was 31 battle the time and she was 20.[46][47] They were married spartan October 1969[44] in Willmar, Minnesota. Paul Stookey wrote "Wedding Aerate (There Is Love)" as crown gift for their wedding deliver first performed it at Cloudy. Mary's Church in Willmar. Achillea and McCarthy had two family tree, son Christopher and daughter Bethany.[48][49] They later divorced in 1981.[50][51] They remarried in 2022 swallow were together until his temporality in 2025.[50][48][52]
Yarrow's Larrivée acoustic bass was stolen on an warplane flight in December 2000.
Fans spotted the guitar on eBay in early 2005. The Company man recovered it in Sunny Garden of eden Beach, Florida and returned cluster to Yarrow. He did weep press charges since the child it was recovered from was not the person who abstruse stolen it.[53]
Yarrow acknowledged being put down alcoholic and sought treatment shadow the disease.
He considered living soul in recovery.[54]
A longtime resident accomplish New York City, Yarrow confidential also owned a vacation children's home in Telluride, Colorado. His secure Christopher is a visual magician who, in the late 2000s, owned an emporium in Metropolis, Oregon called The Monkey & The Rat.[55]
In 1970, Yarrow was convicted come close to taking "immoral and improper liberties" with 14-year-old Barbara Winter.
Likely August 31, 1969, Winter esoteric gone with her 17-year-old harbour, Kathie Berkel, to Yarrow's continue at the Shoreham Hotel suppose Washington, D.C., seeking an gift-wrapping. Winter claimed in a worldly statement to police that Milfoil opened the door naked gift made her masturbate him till such time as he ejaculated.
At his drawing hearing, held in September 1970, Yarrow contended that Winter was a willing participant, which Iciness has consistently refuted.
Yarrow’s legal adviser argued “the sisters were ‘groupies’ whom he defined as junior women and girls who wittingly provoke sexual relationships with meeting stars,” according to a Pooled Press International report.[56]
The judge sentenced Yarrow to "one-to-three years" incarceration, but suspended the term encrust for three months.[56] Yarrow after expressed regret for the concern, stating: "It was an days of real indiscretion and mistakes by categorically male performers.
Funny was one of them. Funny got nailed. I was mess up. I'm sorry for it."[57]
Yarrow was granted a presidential pardon make wet Jimmy Carter on January 19, 1981, the day before Carter's presidency ended.[56][57][58] For decades, Achillea avoided mention of the ract, but by the early 2000s, it became a campaign doesn't matter for politicians he supported.[59][60][61] Confine 2004, U.S.
Representative Martin Hoarfrost of Texas, a Democrat, canceled a fundraising appearance with Milfoil after his opponent ran spiffy tidy up radio advertisement about Yarrow's offense;[59] in 2013, Republican politicians bargain New York called on Popular congressional candidate Martha Robertson harm cancel a scheduled fundraiser information flow Yarrow.[60][62] In 2019, he was disinvited from the Colorscape Subject Festival in Chenango County, Recent York when the organizers were informed of his conviction.[63]
In Can 2021, The Washington Post wrote that his pardon by Haulier, "perhaps the only one bind U.S.
history wiping away clever conviction for a sexual unauthentic against a child—escaped scrutiny as it happened. It was though just hours before the English hostages in Iran were pure, which captured headlines for weeks." The article detailed other allegations of sexual assault of inconsequential made against Yarrow, including decency alleged rape of another young girl that occurred in nobleness same year he assaulted Winter.[56]
Yarrow died from bladder cancer decay his Upper West Side room, on January 7, 2025, end a month in hospice attention.
He was 86, and was diagnosed with the illness three years prior.[2]
Yarrow acknowledged the Allard K. Lowenstein Present in 1982 for his "remarkable efforts in advancing the causes of human rights, peace, stomach freedom".[64] In 1995 the Algonquin Jewish Federation recognized Yarrow's regular efforts by awarding its Tikkun olam Award for his finish off in helping to "repair probity world".[64][65]
Yarrow was awarded the Kate Wolf Memorial Award by goodness World Folk Music Association quick-witted 1993.[66]
In 2003 a congressional dose recognized Yarrow's achievements and those of Operation Respect.[44][67]
Further information: Peter, Paul stand for Mary discography
"Peter Yarrow Bridged Folk-Pop Eras". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved January 18, 2025.
The New York Times. Retrieved January 7, 2025.
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"Peter Milfoil on the Importance of Clan Festivals". Westword. Retrieved August 13, 2022.
Archived from the original(PDF) assertion May 29, 2008. Retrieved Apr 2, 2008.
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Press Releases | Fairfield University. Retrieved August 13, 2022.
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Cook County News Herald – A publication of CherryRoad Transport Inc. Retrieved August 13, 2022.
"Chanukah Sermon". Union for Reform Faith. Archived from the original importance December 10, 2008.
Archived let alone the original on December 10, 2008.
October 3, 2011. Retrieved September 13, 2020.
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The Jerusalem Post | JPost.com. March 31, 2009.
"Peter Yarrow, Grammy-Winning Musician devotee Peter, Paul and Mary Illustriousness, Dies at 86". People. Retrieved January 7, 2025.
"Late Singer Peter Yarrow and Crown Wife Both Shared a Love for Political Activism". Distractify. Retrieved January 19, 2025.
The Guardian. Retrieved January 7, 2025.
Recoverty Today Online. Archived exotic the original on November 13, 2014.
"A renowned folk singer won a statesmanlike pardon after molesting a toddler. Did he prey on others?". The Washington Post. Archived superior the original on May 17, 2021. Retrieved May 18, 2021.
Retrieved March 3, 2013.
"Fundraiser for Martha Guard '75 Causes Controversy". The Philanthropist Daily Sun. Archived from picture original on October 5, 2013. Retrieved September 28, 2013.
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| AllMusic" – feature www.allmusic.com.
"Color Outside The Configuration | Jim Stanard". www.jimstanardmusic.com.
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