Peter Yarrow of the 1960s American folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, who received a presidential pardon after being convicted of sexually assaulting a teenage girl, has died in New York. He was 86.
His longtime publicist told AFP in a statement that Yarrow, the songwriter behind hits like Puff the Magic Dragon, had been battling bladder cancer for four years.
Yarrow and his bandmates Mary Travers and Noel Paul Stookey burst onto the American folk music scene in 1961 with an influential style punctuated by rich three-part harmonies and progressive activist politics.
Born on 31 May 1938 in Manhattan to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, Yarrow studied painting before turning to singing and guitar as a student at Cornell University.
After graduating, he moved to New York and became a regular on Greenwich Village's burgeoning folk scene.
The band blended folk roots and commercial success: their self-titled 1962 debut reigned over the US charts and sold more than two million copies.
Their rendition of Blowin' in the Wind became a popular interpretation of fellow folk singer Bob Dylan's anti-war anthem. Peter, Paul and Mary performed the song at the 1963 March on Washington by the civil rights movement - where the Rev Martin Luther King Jr delivered his I Have a Dream speech - cementing its place in the folk activist canon.
Their version of the progressive protest song If I Had a Hammer - written by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays - earned the trio two of their five Grammy wins.
Their other hits included Day Is Done and The Great Mandala. The trio also covered John Denver's Leavin' on a Jet Plane to chart-topping success.
But they broke up in 1970, shortly after the song's release, partly to pursue solo work and partly because Yarrow was accused of the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl who had gone with her teenage sister to Yarrow's Washington DC hotel room seeking an autograph.
Yarrow served three months of a prison sentence after pleading guilty to taking "indecent liberties" with the child. The victim's family sued Yarrow, settling for an undisclosed sum.
The artist was controversially pardoned in 1981 by then-president Jimmy Carter.
The case trailed him, however: in 2019, as the #MeToo movement gained traction, he was due to perform at a New York arts festival, but the set was cancelled due to protests.
In a statement at the time, Yarrow voiced remorse: "I do not seek to minimize or excuse what I have done and I cannot adequately express my apologies and sorrow for the pain and injury I have caused."
The Washington Post reports that in 2021, another woman alleged Yarrow had raped her when she was a minor in 1969. Her lawsuit was also settled privately.
Neither Yarrow nor his bandmates achieved the fame as solo artists as they did together. They reunited for one-off shows before touring regularly throughout the late 20th century, until Travers was diagnosed with cancer from which she eventually died in 2009.
The group played their final performance together in May 2009 in New Jersey.
Source: AFP
