Peter Yarrow

Peter Yarrow was born on May 31, 1938, in Manhattan to Bernard and Vera (Burtakoff) Yarrow, Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. His father, a lawyer, was an assistant district attorney in New York under Thomas E. Dewey. He later became a vice president of the C.I.A.-funded organization Radio Free Europe. Yarrow’s parents divorced when he was 5. His father later converted to Protestantism, but Mr. Yarrow considered Jewish teachings a major inspiration in his life. After graduating from Cornell, Yarrow moved to New York City and became a performer on the fruitful Greenwich Village folk scene. Albert Grossman paired Yarrow with Mary Travers, who had appeared in Village clubs and sung several times with Pete Seeger. The duo became a trio when, at Travers’s suggestion, they added Noel Paul Stookey, with whom she had performed at a local club. Using Stookey’s middle name, they settled on their catchy biblical moniker - Peter, Paul and Mary. In 1961, the group signed with Warner Bros. Records, which issued their debut album in May. In June 1963, the trio released their cover of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” (Bob Dylan was another client of Grossman’s.) It sold an estimated 300,000 copies in its first week. By mid-August it had hit No. 2; it went on to sell more than a million copies. Their version of another Dylan song, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” broke the Billboard Top 10, boosting the writer’s own album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” into the Top 30. Peter, Paul and Mary had the biggest hit of their career in 1970 when John Denver's “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane,” featuring Travers’s yearning contralto, reached No. 1. But mere months later, they announced their split. Yarrow had been accused of making sexual advances toward a 14-year-old girl who had come to his dressing room with her 17-year-old sister seeking an autograph in 1969. He served three months of a one-to-three-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to taking “indecent liberties” with the girl. In 1981, Mr. Yarrow received a presidential pardon from Jimmy Carter. In 1969, Mr. Yarrow married Marybeth McCarthy, a niece of the Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. The marriage ended in divorce, but they remarried in 2022. In addition to her, Mr. Yarrow is survived by a son, Christopher; a daughter, Bethany; and a granddaughter.