Folk-music great Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary, died in his NYC apartment on Jan. 7. He was 86. The singer, songwriter and guitarist is best known for his work with Peter, Paul [Stookey] and Mary [Travers]. Their ’60s songs “Lemon Tree,” “If I Had a Hammer,” “Puff (The Magic Dragon),” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane” became huge pop hits, especially with students, the coffee-house set, and Suburban Folkies like my parents. Yarrow started performing while a student at Cornell, becoming a regular in the Village hangouts. PP&M debuted in 1961, and shot right to the top (their perfect blend of voices is familiar to all). Yarrow was also a social activist, campaigning in favor of left-wing causes and candidates. He told Westword that “I’ve always been very committed to nurturing new singer-songwriters. If you look at Peter, Paul and Mary’s history and career, the songs that we would sing were of unknown songwriters, which was not the case of most artists at that time, who would look for hit songwriters and do those songs so they could get themselves hits; we were unconcerned with that. We wanted to find songs that were moving to us and wonderful to us. We would find an unknown song, like ‘Blowing in the Wind,’ and record it, and that became the vehicle by which the public would learn about artists like Bob Dylan.”
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