Peter Yarrow, singer of the US folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, has died at the age of 86. The cause was bladder cancer, which Yarrow had been diagnosed with four years ago.

Yarrow took lead vocals on “Puff”, “The Magic Dragon”, “The Great Mandella” and “Day Is Done”, songs he either wrote or co-wrote with Noel Paul Stookey. Stookey is the last surviving member of the group, as Mary Travers died in 2009.

Stookey told The New York Times that Yarrow was his “creative, irrepressible, spontaneous and musical younger brother” for whom he “became grateful and cherished the wisdom beyond his years and the inspiring leadership he shared with me.” have like an older brother. Perhaps Peter was one of the two brothers I never had, and I will miss both of them deeply.”

During their ’60s, the group had six U.S. Top 10 singles and a No. 1, a cover of John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” as well as five Top 10 albums.

They were also politically significant. In August 1963, the progressive trio joined the March on Washington and sang a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, cementing the song’s legacy as an anthem of the civil rights movement.

Yarrow’s songs were often political, telling the story of a war objector on hunger strike in 1967’s “The Great Mandella” and suggesting to his son in “Day Is Done” that his generation could create a better world.

In 1970, he was convicted and served three months in prison for “taking indecent liberties with a minor” after 14-year-old Barbara Winter said when she went to his Washington, D.C. hotel room looking for an autograph, he opened it naked the door and let her touch him until he ejaculated.

Yarrow received a presidential pardon from Jimmy Carter the day before the end of Carter’s presidency in January 1981. In 2019, Yarrow’s scheduled appearance at the Colorscape Chenango Arts Festival in upstate New York was canceled as awareness of the conviction resurfaced.

“I am not trying to minimize or excuse what I did, and I cannot adequately express my apology and regret for the pain and hurt I have caused,” he told New York at the time Times.

In 2021, Winter said she was not informed of the pardon before reading about it in the press. It felt “like being punched in the gut,” she told the Washington Post, which said the pardon was “perhaps the only one in U.S. history to overturn a conviction for a sexual offense against a child.” , noting that this had gone unnoticed at the time and was granted just hours before the release of the US hostages in Iran.

Yarrow was born on May 31, 1938, to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who settled in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated from Cornell University with a degree in psychology in 1959. During his senior year at Cornell University, he began performing and singing in response to folklorist Harold Thompson’s lectures in his “Romp-n-Stomp” classes.

After graduating, he performed in folk clubs in New York City. At the recommendation of manager Albert Grossman, whom he had met after a performance at the 1960 Newport Folk Festival, he met Travers to discuss forming a “weaving group for the baby boom generation”; Travers suggested Stookey complete the group.

They gave their first performance in New York in 1961 and signed with Warner Brothers. Their first hit was a cover of If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song) by Pete Seeger, which reached number 10 in the US in 1962. That year they released their self-titled debut album, which spent 10 months in the US Top 10 and two years in the Top 20.

A year later, the trio popularized Blowin’ in the Wind; Dylan was also managed by Grossman. They also released “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” which became a staple of children’s music – and which, contrary to popular belief, was not about marijuana, but about the loss of childhood innocence.

“Leaving on a Jet Plane” was their last US Top 40 hit in 1969. A year later, the group split up to pursue solo careers due to Yarrow’s conviction, but reunited in 1972 to support Democratic candidate George McGovern’s presidential campaign. and 1978 to protest against nuclear energy and for a reunion tour. The group finally reunited in 1981. Travers died in 2009 from complications of chemotherapy while being treated for leukemia.

In his later years, Yarrow also performed with his daughter Bethany Yarrow and cellist Rufus Cappadocia as Peter, Bethany and Rufus. In 2011, he appeared at an Occupy Wall Street demonstration with Bethany and his son Christopher, singing “Puff” and “We Shall Not Be Moved.”

Yarrow continued to support political candidates throughout his life, but often found that his previous beliefs led the opposition to encourage those candidates to distance themselves from his support.

In 1969, Yarrow married Mary Beth McCarthy, a niece of Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. They divorced but remarried in 2022.