Peter Yarrow, one of the principal singers of the seminal 1960s folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, has died of bladder cancer, The New York Times reports. He was 86 years old.
Yarrow was born in New York, in 1938, to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. He attended the city’s esteemed High School of Music and Art (now known as Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Yarrow returned to his native Manhattan, upon graduation from college, and enmeshed himself in the Greenwich Village folk scene. He was known well enough to earn a spot at the 1960 Newport Folk Festival, where he met Albert Grossman, his eventual manager and the man who put together Peter, Paul and Mary.
Yarrow and his bandmates, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers, released their debut album, Peter, Paul and Mary, in 1962. The album, featuring mostly folk standards and Pete Seeger songs, found great success. The trio’s second album, 1963’s Moving, included Yarrow’s most famous original composition, “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” Peter, Paul and Mary continued apace with albums nearly annually throughout the 1960s, before disbanding initially in 1970.
The group’s breakup was, in part, due to Yarrow’s actions with a 14-year-old girl. The singer was convicted, in 1970, of “taking indecent liberties with a minor” before a concert in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1969. He was sentenced to three months in prison, and Jimmy Carter granted Yarrow a presidential pardon, in 1981, the day before he left office.
Peter, Paul and Mary ultimately reunited, and they continued to perform live until Mary Travers’ death in 2009.