Peter Yarrow Waved Off Peter, Paul and Mary’s Critics

David Hinckley
7 min readJan 12, 2025

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Like his singing mates Mary Travers and Noel Paul Stookey, Peter Yarrow knew that in some musical quarters, Peter, Paul & Mary were considered heretics, taking the sacred art of folk music and diluting it to sell records.

Let’s say he didn’t agree.

Yarrow, who died January 7 at the age of 86 after a four-year fight with bladder cancer, attributed that criticism to those who simply didn’t understand what Peter, Paul & Mary were doing.

Peter, Paul and Mary — actually, Paul, Mary and Peter — in 1963.

“There were a few people from Rolling Stone [magazine] — who now write for the New York Times — who feel that if you’re not from the streets, you’re not sincere,” Yarrow said in a 1983 interview. “Pete Seeger and the Weavers were literate and educated. So was [Bob] Dylan. He sat at the feet of Woody Guthrie and then became another persona.

“I talk the sway I sing. I live in a continuum. I’m not putting on a persona.

“There’s an arrogance to inverse elitism, like saying ‘We have a monopoly on the valid corner of learning.’

“Peter, Paul & Mary know what we feel like when we perform. We know people who have been affected by our music. Sung in their hearts, sung to their children. For me, I’m one very fortunate person, someone given a vehicle by which he could let all that out. It’s a privilege. Singing isn’t something to get me somewhere. It’s an end.”

Yarrow argued, not alone, that folk-rooted music has always been a big tent, and those who would put narrow requirements on entrance are the ones who misunderstand.

It is true, and never a secret, that Peter, Paul & Mary were created to sell records and draw fans to concerts. They were already singers — Stookey also a comedian — brought together by Albert Grossman, the manager who helped steer Dylan to stardom. He was convinced a harmony group singing folk-style music with catchy guitars and hummable melodies could crack the enticingly open world of top-40 radio, which was the golden ticket for popular musicians in the first decades of the rock ’n’ roll era.

The Kingston Trio and to a lesser extent groups like the Tarriers had shown the formula could work with male groups. Grossman liked the look and sound of the Weavers, three men and a woman, and if anyone questioned whether folksongs could be sweetened into sing-alongs, the Weavers were his Exhibit A. They took folksongs from around the world — the Hebrew reel “Tzena Tzena Tzena,” the African chant “Wimoweh,” the American classic “On Top of Old Smokey” — and sang them to the lush strings of Gordon Jenkins.

The Weavers’s recording of “Goodnight Irene” bore little resemblance beyond lyrics to the raw guitar-and-vocal of Leadbelly, who wrote it. At the same time, it’s likely that more listeners came to know the song from the Weavers than from Leadbelly, and that Leadbelly’s bank account also got a heftier boost.

Peter, Paul & Mary weren’t recording for cadres still singing the ballads of the Spanish Civil War. Even when they recorded “If I Had a Hammer” (formerly “The Hammer Song,” and often associated with the Soviet Union’s hammer and sickle), they weren’t targeting the Josef Stalin Appreciation Society. They were targeting me — a 14-year-old suburban kid who got most of his new music from WDRC, his local top-40 radio station.

It worked. I liked Peter, Paul and Mary. I bought their Moving album. They were one of my first live concerts. I loved the drive of “Settle Down.” Still do. I’m pretty sure the first time I heard “Blowin’ in the Wind,” it was PPM on WDRC, probably juxtatposed with “Easier Said Than Done” by the Essex, “Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto or “Fingertips Part I” by Little Stevie Wonder.

Years later, Dylan mostly dodged the question of how much he liked the reworked versions of his songs, like “Blowin’ In the Wind” or Byrds’ releases like “Mr. Tambourine Man.” What he did like, he said, is that these more commercial voices introduced his songwriting to people who might not have otherwise heard it. Like 14-year-old me.

Peter, Paul and Mary, like the Kingston Trio, were my entry point — gateway drug, if you will — to the whole world of folk music, a prairie-sized field that stretches from Mississippi John Hurt, Furry Lewis, the Carter Family and Joni Mitchell to a modern-day gamut that runs from Leonard Cohen to Nanci Griffith to Joe Ely to Christine Lavin.

I wasn’t crazy about everything Peter, Paul & Mary sang. By the time they were singing John Denver’s “Leaving On a Jet Plane,” I was less taken, and “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” just felt cranky. But of all the versions of “Stewball” I’ve ever heard, theirs remains the best, and the vocal harmonies and guitar work on a song like “Day Is Done” remain exactly what Grossman and PPM hoped they would be — listenable beyond their top-40 shelf life.

1983 reunion tour.

“This isn’t like swing music, that was popular in the ’30s and then faded away,” Yarrow said in 1983. “Peter, Paul & Mary express a consensus in a musical, emotional way.” The trio had just launched one of their several reunions with a tour of the Middle East, and Yarrow used that trip to explain the group’s importance.

“We don’t go places like that as tourists or historians,” he said. “We aren’t just entertainers, either. We and our music are integrated into what is going on in the places we visit. Paul wrote a terribly moving song about what was happening in Salvador. Mary went to Russia and met with Refuseniks, Soviet dissidents.”

Like many long-lived groups, Peter, Paul & Mary had separations and reunions, which Yarrow said is just how life works.

“Our music is so intense,” he said, “that sometimes we need time away from each other. When we get back together, on the first day, it’s not quite as smooth. By the third day, it’s intuitive. By the fourth day, we’ve doing improv. It’s preposterous to discount the love that Peter, Paul & Mary have for each other.”

Not all stories about Yarrow were positive. He was convicted in 1971 of “taking indecent liberties” with a 14-year-old girl. He served three months before being pardoned by outgoing President Jimmy Carter in 1981. He apologized. He also admitted to years of alcoholism.

On a happier note, he carved a solo role for himself in the folk music and larger worlds. He was a human rights activist, particularly passionate about Soviet Jewry, and he launched anti-bullying initiatives in school systems. He was a frequent emcee at the Newport Folk Festival and helped found the Kerrville Folk Festival. He recorded albums with his son and daughter and wrote the anthem “Light One Candle.”

He might be best known as for taking a poem by his Cornell classmate Lenny Lipton and putting it to music as “Puff the Magic Dragon,” which would later also become a book and TV specials.

Yarrow always insisted that despite words like “puff” and “paper,” the song wasn’t a sly musical wink about marijuana. While many people have never believed him, it’s not a stretch to think he could be telling the truth. Yarrow was smart and serious. Puckish, not so much.

At the March on Washington, August 1963.

Example: “The three of us sang ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ at the March on Washington,” he said in 1983, “and now it’s an anthem. Here was a crucible of history and here for a moment we had the chance to be the voice of consolidation of intent.”

That’s one way to put it.

Of the 1983 Middle Eastern tour, he said, “It not only had great significance for us, but for the crowd. We were told it was the largest paid audience in history there.”

And, he added, “We got a phone call from the house that sells Peter, Paul & Mary records at concerts. After this show they were temporarily out of stock.”

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David Hinckley
David Hinckley

Written by David Hinckley

David Hinckley wrote for the New York Daily News for 35 years. Now he drives his wife crazy by randomly quoting Bob Dylan and “Casablanca.”

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