Photo Credit: Peter Yarrow by Marsha Miller / LBJ Library
Peter Yarrow, singer-songwriter best known for the hit “Puff the Magic Dragon” with folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, has passed away at age 86.
Peter Yarrow, singer-songwriter best known as one-third of folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, has passed away at age 86. The group’s activist-focused harmonies in favor of civil rights and against war delighted fans throughout the 1960s. Yarrow also co-wrote the group’s biggest hit, “Puff the Magic Dragon.”
According to publicist Ken Sunshine, Yarrow died in New York on Tuesday, after battling bladder cancer for the past four years.
“Our fearless dragon is tired and has entered the last chapter of his magnificent life,” wrote Yarrow’s daughter Bethany in a statement. “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.”
Throughout the 1960s, Peter, Paul, and Mary — Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey, and Mary Travers — released six Billboard Top 10 singles, two No. 1 albums, and won five Grammy Awards.
The group also brought Bob Dylan early exposure as a songwriter with their renditions of two of his songs, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which were Billboard Top 10 hits. Peter, Paul, and Mary performed “Blowin’ in the Wind” at the March on Washington in 1963, where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Yarrow’s role in Bob Dylan’s shift to electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 was recently captured in the 2024 Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown.” As he was on the festival board and emceeing the show, Yarrow begged Dyan to go back onstage to play another song. Dylan took Yarrow’s acoustic guitar and went back to play “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”
Peter, Paul, and Mary reunited in 1978 after an eight-year hiatus for an anti-nuclear-power concert, “Survival Sunday,” organized by Yarrow in Los Angeles. The trio remained together from then on until Travers’ death in 2009. Yarrow and Stookey would go on to play both separately and together following her passing.
Born in 1938 in New York, Peter Yarrow graduated from Cornell University in 1959 with a degree in psychology. While working as a teaching assistant for a class in American folklore his senior year, Yarrow found his true calling in folk music. After graduation, he returned to New York and worked as a struggling musician in Greenwich Village before meeting Stookey and Travers.