Peter Yarrow, Jewish musician and activist of Peter, Paul and Mary fame

(JTA) — Peter Yarrow, one-third of the hit-making 1960s folk group Peter, Paul and Mary, and a Jewish activist who promoted Israeli-Palestinian coexistence and other progressive causes, died Tuesday, Jan. 7 at age 86.

The longtime resident of Manhattan’s Upper West Side entered hospice last month. The cause of death was bladder cancer.

Yarrow was a Cornell graduate playing in Greenwich Village clubs during the early 1960s folk revival when manager and musical impresario Albert Grossman, who also steered Bob Dylan’s career, suggested he team up with the Kentucky-born singer Mary Travers. Travers in turn proposed they include Paul Stookey.

After polishing their act at clubs in the Village like the Bitter End and the Gaslight, the trio signed with Warner and went on to record a series of hits, including folk standards like Lemon Tree and 500 Miles, and compositions by other revivalists, including Pete Seeger’s If I Had a Hammer, and Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind.

Their debut album, Peter, Paul and Mary, reached Billboard magazine’s Top Ten for 10 months, including seven weeks at No. 1. They sang If I had a Hammer at the August 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech.”

Yarrow wrote the music for the group’s best-known composition, Puff, the Magic Dragon, with lyrics by his Cornell classmate Leonard Lipton. The song became a standard both at summer camps and in college dorm rooms, where the counterculture saw drug references that Yarrow always denied were there.

The group performed regularly well after the folk revival faded. In a 1982 concert at Carnegie Hall they first sang Light One Candle, Yarrow’s song about the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. Yarrow said he wrote the song (whose lyrics include “Light one candle to bind us together with peace”) to express his opposition to Israel’s war that year in Lebanon; the trio performed it the next year in Jerusalem to a large and mostly enthusiastic audience.

Yarrow was a supporter of the Israeli left-wing group Peace Now, which advocates for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Yarrow was born in 1938 in New York City. His mother was a high school teacher in Manhattan; his father, who emigrated from Ukraine at age 16, was a lawyer who helped create Radio Free Europe, a U.S. propaganda channel launched during the Cold War. His parents divorced when he was five. According to Yarrow, he had no contact with his father until his mid-30s and credited his mother with instilling in him progressive values.

“What was important was learning. It was a Jewish family,” he told the Jewish Post. “There was money for education of every sort. There was money for music lessons, summer camp, and for her children, but not for jewelry or Rolex watches. She never stopped working. She was really focused on things of great importance. This is where my value system arose and my commitment to being an activist was what she embraced.”