Peter Yarrow
Peter Yarrow was an American singer and songwriter who found fame as a member of the 1960s folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary along with Paul Stookey and Mary Travers.
Born in Manhattan in 1938, he attended New York's High School of Music and Art as a teenager and was then accepted at Cornell University. During his last year at Cornell in 1959, he began his music career as a student guitar instructor there, and after graduating, met the manager and impresiaro Albert Grossman. Grossman's idea of a musical trio eventually led to Yarrow forming a folk band with Stookey and Travers.
Peter, Paul and Mary's early hits included "Lemon Tree" and "If I Had a Hammer", which was followed by their self-titled debut studio album in 1962. Yarrow co-wrote one of the group's best known hits, "Puff, the Magic Dragon". He was also involved in the civil rights movement, performing for the March on Washington and Selma to Montgomery marches.
In 1970, Yarrow was convicted of sexually molesting 14-year-old Barbara Winter, and sentenced to "one-to-three years" imprisonment, of which he only served three months after the term was suspended. He further received a federal pardon by president Jimmy Carter in 1981. Initially claiming that the act was consensual, Yarrow later apologized for the incident. Other allegations of sexual assault were made against him in 2021.
Yarrow pursued a solo career in the 1970s, releasing his debut album Peter in 1972. He received awards for his continued activism. In the 2000s, he engaged in anti-bullying efforts in schools, for which helped start Operation Respect. He died at his Upper West Side apartment at the age of 86 of bladder cancer.
Early life and family
Peter Yarrow was born in Manhattan on May 31, 1938, the son of Vera Wisebrode and Bernard Yarrow. His parents were educated Ukrainian Jewish immigrants whose families had settled in Providence, Rhode Island.Bernard Yarrow attended the Jagiellonian University and the Odesa University 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. He was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services, where he served with distinction, in 1944.
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. He became a senior vice-president of the CIA-funded Radio Free Europe, an organization he helped found, in 1952.
Yarrow's mother, Vera, who had come to the United States at the age of three, became a speech and drama teacher at New York City's Julia Richman Education Complex for girls. She and Bernard divorced in 1943, when Peter was five. 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 City'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 and Richard Fariña.
Music career
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. Yarrow served as a student instructor for the class and was paid a stipend of $500, leading students in the songs. These included traditional folk songs and murder ballads, Dust Bowl songs made popular by Woody Guthrie, and songs associated with the civil rights movement.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' 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 Bros.
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 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 Billboards 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.
Yarrow was instrumental in founding the New Folks Concert series at both the Newport Folk Festival and the Kerrville Folk Festival. His work at Kerrville has been called his "most important achievement in this arena".
Yarrow co-wrote and produced "Torn Between Two Lovers", a number one hit for Mary MacGregor. 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.
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.
Yarrow portrayed leftist intellectual Ira Mandelstam in the 2015 film While We're Young. In the 2024 Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, Yarrow is portrayed by Nick Pupo.
Criminal conviction and pardon
In 1970, Yarrow was convicted of taking "immoral and improper liberties" with 14-year-old Barbara Winter. The incident occurred on August 31, 1969, when Winter and her 17-year-old sister, Kathie Berkel, visited Yarrow's room at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., seeking an autograph. Winter stated in a sworn statement to police that Yarrow answered the door naked and made her manually stimulate him until he ejaculated. During his sentencing hearing in September 1970, Yarrow asserted that the act was consensual, but Winter has repeatedly denied this. Yarrow's attorney further argued that "the sisters were 'groupies' whom he defined as young women and girls who deliberately provoke sexual relationships with music stars".The judge sentenced Yarrow to "one-to-three years" imprisonment, but suspended the term except for three months. Yarrow later expressed regret for the incident, stating: "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."
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 conviction, but in 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 aired a radio advertisement about Yarrow's offense. Similar calls from Republicans urged Democratic candidate Martha Robertson to cancel a fundraiser with Yarrow in 2013. In 2019, Yarrow was uninvited from the Colorscape Arts Festival in Chenango County, New York, when the organizers became aware of his conviction.
In 2021, The Washington Post revealed additional allegations of sexual assault made against Yarrow, including the alleged rape of a teenage girl in the same year that he assaulted Winter.