Folk icon Peter Yarrow '59, of Peter, Paul and Mary, dies at 86 ...

Musician Peter Yarrow ’59, who drew early inspiration from his time at Cornell before joining the legendary folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, died Jan. 7 in Manhattan. He was 86.

In 1961, Yarrow teamed with Mary Travers and Noel Paul Stookey to form one of the most popular folk acts of the 1960s. They would go on to place six songs and five albums in the Billboard’s top 10, with two albums reaching No. 1. Yarrow wrote or co-wrote iconic songs including “Puff the Magic Dragon” – co-written while still at Cornell, and with lyrics based on a poem by Leonard Lipton ’62..

Yarrow majored in psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences and cited as inspiration American Folk Literature, a course nicknamed Romp-n-Stomp, taught by professor and folklorist Harold Thompson. Yarrow served as a student instructor for the class, where he was paid a stipend of $500 – which at the time was 20% of his Cornell tuition, he said – to lead students in songs related to the course content. This included murder and Dust Bowl ballads, and spirituals sung by enslaved peoples.

“If you take what I learned in Romp-n-Stomp and look at Peter, Paul and Mary in the march on Washington in 1963, singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘If I Had a Hammer,’ it was just an extrapolation from Romp-n-Stomp,’” Yarrow later said.

Yarrow returned to Cornell for his 50th reunion in 2009 to take part in a Romp-n-Stomp revival, playing with other alumni musicians and leading more than 900 people in song in Bailey Hall. He returned to perform at his 60th reunion in 2019.

Cornell was “a place where I felt comfortable,” Yarrow said.

Peter Yarrow was born May 31, 1938, in Manhattan to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. He attended the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) in Manhattan, where he studied painting, and took up playing and performing music while at Cornell.

After graduation, he moved back to New York City and began to make a name for himself in the Greenwich Village folk scene. He connected with Albert Grossman, a founder of the Newport Folk Festival, who set him up with Travers and Stookey. In 1961, the newly formed trio of Peter, Paul and Mary released their first album under Warner Bros. Records. The self-titled album went on to reach No. 1 on the Billboard charts and sell more than 2 million copies. In the next nine years, the group released eight more albums, with 12 songs reaching Billboard’s top 40. 

The group was overtly progressive in its politics, and remade Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” into a civil rights anthem when they sang it on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, at the site of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Later, they performed for presidential campaigns and at marches to protest the Vietnam War.

After the band split in 1970, Yarrow released a solo album and continued to write songs, reuniting with the group for benefit concerts and, after 1978, to tour regularly, which they did until Travers’ death in 2009. In 2000, he founded Operation Respect, a nonprofit dedicated to creating safe and tolerant learning environments for schoolchildren.

Of the group’s legacy, Yarrow said in 2014 on WNYC Studios’ Soundcheck podcast: “These songs are around. They’re in the summer camps. They’re in the schools. They’re in the churches, the synagogues, the mosques even. They’re not going away. They were there before the folk renaissance, and they will stand as part of our culture for a long time.”

Yarrow is survived by his wife Mary Beth McCarthy, as well as a son, daughter and granddaughter.