# Peter Yarrow

Peter Yarrow (May 31, 1938 – January 7, 2025) 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. Yarrow co-wrote (with Lenny Lipton) one of the group's best known hits, "Puff, the Magic Dragon" (1963). He was also a political activist and supported causes that ranged from opposition to the Vietnam War to school anti-bullying programs.
Yarrow was convicted and jailed, in 1970, for taking "immoral and improper liberties" with a 14-year-old girl, for which he was pardoned in 1981 by President Jimmy Carter.

## Early life and family

Peter Yarrow was born in Manhattan on May 31, 1938, the son 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) and the Odesa University (Odesa) 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 (1904–1991), 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 (equivalent to about 20% of his tuition fees), 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 of 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 (equivalent to $51,000 in 2024) 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 Billboard's 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. On August 31, 1969, Winter had gone with her 17-year-old sister, Kathie Berkel, to Yarrow's room at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., seeking an autograph. Winter claimed in a sworn statement to police that Yarrow opened the door naked and made her manually stimulate him until he ejaculated. At his sentencing hearing, held in September 1970, Yarrow contended that Winter was a willing participant. Winter consistently refuted this claim. Moreover, she could not have legally consented, in any case, because of her age. Yarrow's attorney argued "the sisters were 'groupies' whom he defined as young women and girls who deliberately provoke sexual relationships with music stars", according to a United Press International report.
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 assault, but by 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 ran a radio advertisement about Yarrow's offense; in 2013, Republican politicians in New York called on Democratic congressional candidate Martha Robertson to cancel a scheduled fundraiser with Yarrow. In 2019, he was disinvited from the Colorscape Arts Festival in Chenango County, New York when the organizers learned of his conviction.
In May 2021, The Washington Post wrote that his pardon by Carter, "perhaps the only one in U.S. history wiping away a conviction for a sexual offense against a child—escaped scrutiny when it happened. It was granted just hours before the American hostages in Iran were freed, which captured headlines for weeks." The article detailed other allegations of sexual assault of minors made against Yarrow, including the alleged rape of another teenage girl that occurred in the same year he assaulted Winter.

## Social activism

Yarrow had long been an activist for social and political causes. What he did was not always popular. According to The New York Times:
   As their fame grew, Peter, Paul and Mary mixed music with political and social activism. The trio marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, D.C., in 1963 and in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. The three participated in countless demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. They sang at the 1969 March on Washington, which Mr. Yarrow helped to organize. Though their activism provoked a steady stream of death threats, they were never harmed. "But for years, I used to bite my fingernails on stage," [Mary] Travers says. "There you are and look like the back porch light, and stare out at 12,000 or 15,000 people. Any one of whom could have had a gun."

### Operation Respect

In 2000, in an effort to combat school bullying, Yarrow helped start Operation Respect, a nonprofit organization that brings to children, in schools and camps, a curriculum of tolerance and respect for each other's differences. The project began as a result of Yarrow and his daughter Bethany and his son Christopher having heard the song "Don't Laugh at Me" (written by Steve Seskin and Allen Shamblin) at the Kerrville Folk Festival.
In March 2008, Yarrow told Reuters:
   Operation Respect has been my main and all-consuming work for the past 10 years. My perception is that the kind of bullying, humiliation that goes on in children's schools leads to high rates of depression that was virtually unknown when I was young and the high suicide rate of teenagers which we know is almost inevitably caused by bullying or mean-spiritedness. It is a reflection of the role models that young people observe on TV shows like a lot of the reality shows. It is also part and parcel of the characteristics in the adult world of America.

### Other activism

Yarrow's leadership in the campaign to free Soviet Jewry inspired another generation. Of the song "Light One Candle", Rabbi Allison Bergman Vann wrote:
   Peter Yarrow's now famous song, which was written in 1983, became a defining song for my generation of high school and college students to become activists, to make the world a better place. I heard Peter Yarrow singing that song on the steps of the Capitol, in 1987, twenty years ago next week, during the march to free Soviet Jews. Listening to him sing, surrounded by literally thousands of like-minded individuals, I learned of my obligation to change the world; to engage in tikkun olam, repair of our broken world. And, during that incredible day, I knew that we could, indeed, change the world.
Yarrow performed in Ho Chi Minh City at a concert to benefit the Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange in 2005; Yarrow pleaded with the Vietnamese for forgiveness of the United States.
Yarrow served on the board of directors of the Connecticut Hospice.
Yarrow performed across New York City for volunteers who worked for the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama on November 1, 2008.
Yarrow, his son and his daughter made an appearance at Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street protests on October 3, 2011, playing songs such as "We Shall Not Be Moved" and a variation of "Puff the Magic Dragon".
Yarrow was a member of Braver Angels.

## Personal life

Yarrow cited Judaism as one of the roots of his liberal views. To him, "Jewishness means to live according to justice and that's a burden, it means we have to form our own set of morality and values and live by them."
While campaigning for 1968 presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, Yarrow met McCarthy's niece, Mary Beth McCarthy, in Wisconsin. He was 31 at the time and she was 20. They were married in October 1969 in Willmar, Minnesota. Paul Stookey wrote "Wedding Song (There Is Love)" as his gift for their wedding and first performed it at St. Mary's Church in Willmar. Yarrow and McCarthy had two children, daughter Bethany and son Christopher. They later divorced in 1981. They remarried in 2022 and were together until his death in 2025.
Yarrow's Larrivée acoustic guitar was stolen on an airplane flight in December 2000. Fans spotted the guitar on eBay in early 2005. The FBI recovered it in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida and returned it to Yarrow. He did not press charges since the person it was recovered from was not the person who had stolen it.
Yarrow acknowledged being an alcoholic and sought treatment for the disease. He considered himself in recovery.
A longtime resident of New York City, Yarrow had also owned a vacation home in Telluride, Colorado. His son Christopher is a visual artist who, in the late 2000s, owned an emporium in Portland, Oregon called The Monkey & The Rat.

### Death

Yarrow died from bladder cancer at his Upper West Side apartment, on January 7, 2025, after a month in hospice care. He was 86, and was diagnosed with the illness four years prior.

## Awards and honors

Yarrow received the Allard K. Lowenstein Award in 1982 for his "remarkable efforts in advancing the causes of human rights, peace, and freedom". In 1995 the Miami Jewish Federation recognized Yarrow's continual efforts by awarding its Tikkun olam Award for his part in helping to "repair the world".
Yarrow was awarded the Kate Wolf Memorial Award by the World Folk Music Association in 1993.
In 2003 a congressional resolution recognized Yarrow's achievements and those of Operation Respect.

## Discography
### Solo

* 1972: Peter (US No. 163)
* 1973: That's Enough for Me (US No. 203)
* 1975: Hard Times
* 1975: Love Songs
* 2010: The Peter Yarrow Sing-Along Special

### Peter, Bethany and Rufus

* 2008: Puff & Other Family Classics

### Other contributions

* 1971: Lazarus – Lazarus; producer
* 1973: A Fool's Paradise – Lazarus; producer
* 1984: Here With Me – Kamifusen; songwriter, "Cherry Blossom"
* 2020: Color Outside the Lines – Jim Stanard; vocals on songs "Home" and "Arkansas", along with Bethany Yarrow