Peter Yarrow

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Peter Yarrow (born May 31, 1938) is an American singer and songwriter who rose to prominence with the 1960s folk music group Peter, Paul, and Mary.

"Puff, the Magic Dragon" co-wrote by Yarrow (with Leonard Lipton) one of the company's most popular hits, "Puff, the Wizard Dragon."

He has been a social reformer who has lobbied for liberal causes, from the Vietnam War to the establishment of Operation Respect, an association that promotes equality and civility in schools.

Early life and family

Peter Yarrow was born in Manhattan and is the nephew of Vera Wisebrode (née Vira Burtakoff) and Bernard Yarrow. His parents were educated Ukrainian Jewish immigrants whose families had settled in Providence, Rhode Island.

Bernard Yarrow (1899–1973) attended the Jagiellonian University (Kraków, Poland) and the Odessa University (Odessa, Ukraine) before emigrating to the United States in 1922 at the age of 23. He anglicized his surname from Yaroshevitz to Yarrow and graduated from Columbia University in 1925 as part of Phi Sigma Delta fraternity. He continued to work in New York City until 1938, when he was first appointed an assistant district attorney under then-district attorney Thomas E. Dewey's then-district attorney Thomas E. Dewey. He was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services, where he served with distinction in 1944.

Bernard Yarrow joined Sullivan and Cromwell, the Dulles brothers' law firm, after the war. He was a founding member of the National Committee for a Free Europe, an anti-Communist group. He became a senior vice president of Radio Free Europe in 1952, a group he helped found in 1952.

Vera Yarrow (1904-1991), who had arrived in America at the age of three, became a speech and drama tutor at New York's Julia Richman High School for Girls. In 1943, when their son Peter was five, she and Bernard divorced, and Vera married Harold Wisebrode, the executive director of the Central Synagogue in Manhattan. Bernard Yarrow married Silvia Tima Tim, a London OSS veteran, and converted to Protestantism.

Peter Yarrow spent the summers of 1951 and 1952 at Interlochen's Music Camp. Peter finished second in his class with a physics award from New York's High School of Music and Art, where he had studied painting. He was accepted as a physics major at Cornell University but then changed majors, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology in 1959. Thomas Pynchon, Richard Faria, and David Shetzline were among his Cornell classmates.

Personal life

Judaism has been cited as one of his liberal convictions by Yarrow.

Eugene McCarthy, McCarthy's niece, Mary Beth McCarthy, met McCarthy in Wisconsin while campaigning for 1968 presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. They were married in Willmar, Minnesota, in October 1969. As their wedding gift, Paul Stookey wrote "Wedding Song (There Is Love)" and first performed it at St. Mary's Church in Willmar. They had two children but then divorced.

The Larrivee acoustic guitar of Yarrow was stolen onboard an airplane flight in December 2000. Fans of the guitar were spotted on eBay in early 2005. The Federal Bureau of Investigation recovered it in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, and returned it to Yarrow. He did not press charges because the individual whose it was recovered from had not robbed it.

On CBS early morning show The Early Show, Yarrow performed "The Colonoscopy Song" in the world premiere.

Yarrow has admitted to being an alcoholic and has sought medical assistance for the condition. He believes he is in recovery.

Yarrow, a longtime resident of New York City, has also enjoyed a vacation home in Telluride, Colorado. Christopher Yarrow's uncle, The Monkey & The Rat, a late-2000s visual artist who owned an emporium in Portland, Oregon, dubbed The Monkey & The Rat in the late 2000s.

Yarrow was found guilty and served three months in jail for taking "improper rights" with a 14-year-old girl who went with her 17-year-old sister to Yarrow's hotel room in 1970, demanding an autograph. "Yarrow answered the door naked and made sexual advances that were short of intercourse." Yarrow completed three months in prison, from one-to-three years in prison. He apologised for the incident, saying that "it was an era of real insight and mistakes by categorically male actors." I was one of them. I was shot and killed. I was wrong. "I'm sorry for it."

Jimmy Carter granted a presidential pardon on January 19, 1981, the day before Carter's presidency came to an end. Yarrow avoided discussing this sexual assault for decades, but by the early 2000s, it became a campaign issue for politicians he endorses. Representative Martin Frost of Texas, a Democrat, cancelled a fundraising appearance with Yarrow after his opponent ran a radio advertisement about Yarrow's murder in 2004; in 2013, Republican lawmakers in New York called on Democratic congressional candidate Martha Robertson to cancel a planned fundraiser with Yarrow. He was barred from a folk music festival in 2019 when the festival's organizers were told of his deposition.

In May 2021, the Washington Post reported that "[Yarrow's] pardon by Carter, possibly the only one in the United States to have a conviction against a child, failed to stand over a conviction. It was released just hours before the American hostages in Iran were released, and it took over the newspaper for weeks. Other reports of sexual assault of minors have been included in the same journal.

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Music career

Yarrow began singing on campus during his last year at Cornell, while studying in Harold Thompson's renowned American Folk Literature course, colloquially known on campus as "Romp-n-Stomp." The course was "a highlight of late-graduate life at Cornell," Yarrow reminisced, and enrollment was a prerequisite. Thompson will lecture on a topic for 20 to 30 minutes, and then a student will perform songs related to his theme. For Yarrow, who discovered he loved it, the performance in front of a large audience was a thrilling one. He started out as a weekend singer who would lead community choirs.

Yarrow performed in folk clubs in New York City, appeared on CBS television show Folk Sound USA, and appeared at the Newport Folk Festival, where he met manager and musical impresario Albert Grossman. Grossman's plan for a new group at Israel Young's Folklore Center in Greenwich Village was discussed for one day by the two friends, "an updated version of the Weavers for the baby boom period... with the Kingston Trio's crossover appeal." Yarrow noticed a snapshot of Mary Travers on the wall and asked Grossman who she was. "That's Mary Travers," Grossman said. "If you could get her to work," says the narrator. The lanky, blonde Travers, who was born in Greenwich Village, was well-known in folk song circles. She had been chosen by Elizabeth Irwin's chorus leader Robert De Cormier to perform in The Song Swappers, a collective of the Almanac Singers' The Talking Union and two other albums as a high-school student at the progressive Elizabeth Irwin High School. Travers was also a people singer in a short-lived Broadway play titled The Next President, starring satirist Mort Sahl, but she was also ashamed to be introverted and unable to sing properly.

"Mr. Yarrow went to Ms. Travers' apartment on MacDougal Street, across from the Gaslight, one of the main folk clubs, to drive Travers out." They harmonized on 'Miner's Lifeguard', a union song, and decided that their voices would blend. Ms. Travers suggested Noel Stookey, a friend of folk music and stand-up comedy at the Gaslight to round out the trio. They went for "Peter, Paul, and Mary" as the group's name, and Noel Stookey's middle name was Paul, and they rehearsed vigorously for six months before debuting in 1961 as a polished act at The Bitter End nightclub in Greenwich Village. There, the singers quickly established a following and signed a Warner Brothers deal.

In early 1962, Warner released Peter, Paul and Mary's "Lemon Tree" as a single. The trio performed "If I Had a Hammer," a song written in 1949 by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays to protest Harlem City Councilman Benjamin J. Davis, Jr.'s release under the Smith Act. In 1962, "If I had a Hammer" received two Grammy Awards. The trio's debut album, titled eponymous Peter, Paul & Mary, remained in the Top ten months and in the Top 20 for two years; it has more than two million copies. The band toured extensively and produced several albums, both live and in the studio.

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 in June 1963. During the first week of its introduction, "Blowin' in the Wind" sold 300,000 copies; by August 17, it was the most popular Billboard pop chart, with sales exceeding one million copies. Dylan was speechless when he told Dylan that he would make more than $5,000 (equivalent to $44,000 in 2021) from the publishing rights. Peter, Paul, and Mary appeared on stage with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. on August 28, 1963, the first national rights anthem in Washington. Billboard's simple listening chart was also included in their version. The 26-year-old Yarrow had joined the Newport Folk Festival's Board by 1964, where he had appeared as an outsider just four years earlier.

"Puff the Magic Dragon," "Light One Candle," and "The Great Mandala" are among Yarrow's best-known songs, including "Puff, the Magic Dragon," "Day Is Done," "Man, Lady" and "The Great Mandala." He received an Emmy Award for the Great Performances Live 1996, a highly coveted celebration of folk music, whose musical mentors, contemporaries, and a new generation of singer-songwriters is among the trio's members.

Yarrow was instrumental in the establishment of the New Folks Concert series at both the Newport Folk Festival and the Kerrville Folk Festival. Kerrville's work has been dubbed his "most significant contribution in this sector."

"Torn Between Two Lovers," a number one hit for Mary McGregor, was written and produced by Yarrow. In addition, he produced three CBS television specials based on "Puff, the Magic Dragon," which received an Emmy Award for him. After a period of separation, Yarrow founded Survival Sunday, an antinuclear charity, and Stookey and Travers returned to him in 1978.

Yarrow and his daughter, Bethany Yarrow, appear together often. Peter, Bethany, and Rufus were created by cellist Rufus Capuocia together. They also included the CD Puff & Other Family Classics. The musical special Peter, Bethany & Rufus: Spirit of Woodstock, starring a live performance of the band, aired on public television in 2008.

In the 2015 film When We're Young, Yarrow depicted leftist intellectual Ira Mandelstam.

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