LOS ANGELES (AP) — Peter Yarrow, the singer-songwriter best known as one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary, the folk music trio whose passionate harmonies captivated millions as they raised their voices for civil rights and against war raised, died. He was 86.

Yarrow, who also co-wrote the group’s most enduring song, “Puff the Magic Dragon,” died Tuesday in New York, publicist Ken Sunshine said. Yarrow had suffered from bladder cancer for four years.

“Our fearless dragon is tired and has reached the final chapter of his great life. The world knows Peter Yarrow, the legendary folk activist, but the person behind the legend is just as generous, creative, passionate, playful and wise as his lyrics suggest,” his daughter Bethany said in a statement.

During an incredible run of success in the 1960s, Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers released six Billboard Top 10 singles, two No. 1 albums and won five Grammys.

They also put Bob Dylan on the map early on by making two of his songs, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Billboard Top 10 hits, sparking a renaissance of the contributed to folk music in the USA. They performed “Blowin’ in the Wind” at the 1963 March on Washington, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

Yarrow played roles on and off stage at the legendary Newport Folk Festival in 1965 when Dylan went electric. Yarrow was on the festival’s board and hosted the show, begging Dylan to play a song again after his blistering set, a scene captured in the 2024 biopic “A Complete Unknown.” Dylan picked up Yarrow’s acoustic guitar and played “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”

After an eight-year hiatus to pursue solo careers, the trio met in 1978 for a “Survival Sunday,” an anti-nuclear concert organized by Yarrow in Los Angeles. They remained together until Travers’ death in 2009. After her death, Yarrow and Stookey continued to perform individually and together.

Yarrow was born in New York on May 31, 1938, and grew up in an upper-middle-class family that, he said, placed great value on the arts and sciences. He took violin lessons as a child and later switched to guitar when he became interested in the works of folk music icons such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.

After graduating from Cornell University in 1959, he returned to New York, where he worked as a musician in Greenwich Village until he came into contact with Stookey and Travers. Although he earned a degree in psychology, he had found his true calling in folk music at Cornell University, working as a teaching assistant for a course on American folklore during his senior year.

“I did it for the money, because I wanted to wash less dishes and play guitar more,” he told the late record label boss Joe Smith. But as he led the singing class, he began to discover the emotional impact music can have on an audience.

“I saw these young people at Cornell, who were very conservative at heart, open their hearts and sing with emotion and concern through this vehicle called folk music,” he said. “It gave me a clue that the world was moving toward a certain kind of movement and that folk music could play a role in that and that I could play a role in folk music.”

Shortly after returning to New York, he met the impresario Albert Grossman, who later managed Dylan, Janis Joplin and others, and who at the time wanted to put together a group that could compete with the Kingston Trio, which had a hit in 1958. Ballad “Tom Dooley”.

But Grossman wanted a trio with a singer and a member who could be funny enough to captivate the audience with comedic lines. For the latter, Yarrow suggested a guitar-strumming Greenwich Village comic he had seen named Noel Stookey.

Stookey, who would use his middle name as a member of the group, happened to be a friend of Travers, having performed and recorded with Pete Seeger and others as a teenager. Caught with stage fright, she was initially hesitant to join them, but changed her mind when she heard how well her alto voice blended with Yarrow’s tenor and Stookey’s baritone.

“We called Noel. He was there,” said Yarrow, remembering the three of them’s first appearance together. “We mentioned a bunch of folk songs that he didn’t know because he didn’t have a real folk music background, and ended up singing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.'” And it was immediately great, crystal clear, and we started working. “

After months of rehearsals, the three became overnight sensations when their first album, 1962’s eponymous “Peter, Paul and Mary,” reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts. Her second song, “In the Wind,” reached No. 4 and her third, “Moving,” took her back to No. 1.

From their earliest albums, the trio sang against war and war in songs such as “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have all the Flowers Gone” by Seeger, “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Dylan and “When the Ship Comes In”. Injustice. and Yarrow’s own “Day is Done.”

They were also able to show a gentle and poignant side, particularly on “Puff the Magic Dragon,” which Yarrow wrote while at Cornell with his college friend Leonard Lipton.

It tells the story of Jackie Paper, a little boy who goes on countless adventures with his supposed dragon friend until he outgrows such childhood fantasies and is left a sobbing, inconsolable puff. As Yarrow explains, “A dragon lives forever, but not such little boys.”

Some insisted they heard references to drugs in the song, a claim at the heart of a famous scene in the film “Meet the Parents,” in which Ben Stiller angers his girlfriend’s disgruntled father (Robert De Niro) by saying, ” Puff” refers to marijuana smoke. Yarrow claimed it reflected the loss of childhood innocence and nothing more.

After recording their final No. 1 hit, a 1969 cover of John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” the trio split up the following year to pursue solo careers.

That same year, Yarrow pleaded guilty to taking indecent liberties with a 14-year-old girl who had come to his hotel room with her older sister to ask for autographs. The couple found him naked when he opened the door and let them in. Yarrow, who resumed his career after three months in prison, was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1981. Over the decades, he apologized again and again.

“I fully support the current movements that demand equal rights for all and refuse to allow continued abuse and violations – particularly of a sexual nature, for which I am deeply saddened,” he told The New York Times in 2019 about the Judgment excluded from a festival.

Over the years, Yarrow continued to write and write songs, including the 1976 hit “Torn Between Two Lovers” for Mary MacGregor. He received an Emmy nomination in 1979 for the animated film “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

Later songs include the civil rights anthem “No Easy Walk to Freedom,” co-written with Margery Tabankin, and “Light One Candle,” which calls for peace in Lebanon.

Yarrow, who along with Travers and Stookey had supported Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential candidacy, met Minnesota Senator Mary Beth McCarthy’s niece at a campaign event. The couple married the following year. Before the divorce they had two children. They married again in 2022.

In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by a son, Christopher, and a granddaughter, Valentina.

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AP Entertainment Writer Mark Kennedy contributed reporting from New York. Rogers, the lead author of this obituary, retired from The Associated Press in 2021.