Peter Yarrow, singer from Peter, Paul and Mary folk trio, dead at 86
Peter Yarrow, known as part of the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, has died.
Yarrow passed away Tuesday in New York, according to publicist Ken Sunshine. The musician had spent the last four years battling bladder cancer.
"Our fearless dragon is tired and has entered the last chapter of his magnificent life. The world knows Peter Yarrow the iconic folk activist, but the human being behind the legend is every bit as generous, creative, passionate, playful, and wise as his lyrics suggest," his daughter Bethany said in a statement.
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Yarrow was one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary, alongside fellow musicians Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers. The trio lost Travers in 2009 during her battle with Leukemia. She died following complications associated with chemotherapy.
"Being an only child, growing up without siblings may have afforded me the full attention of my parents, but with the formation of Peter, Paul and Mary, I suddenly had a brother named Peter Yarrow," Stookey said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital. "He was best man at my wedding and I at his. He was a loving ‘uncle’ to my three daughters. And, while his comfort in the city and my love of the country tended to keep us apart geographically, our different perspectives were celebrated often in our friendship and our music.
"I was five months older than Peter – who became my creative, irrepressible, spontaneous and musical younger brother – yet at the same time, I grew to be grateful for, and to love, the mature-beyond-his-years wisdom and inspiring guidance he shared with me like an older brother," he added. "Politically astute and emotionally vulnerable, perhaps Peter was both of the brothers I never had…and I shall deeply miss both of him."
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Peter, Paul and Mary gained popularity after forming in 1961. The trio brought notoriety to folk music in America. Throughout the 1960s, the group released six Billboard Top 10 singles, two No. 1 albums and won five Grammys.
The band's first album, "Peter, Paul and Mary," reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart. Their second, "In the Wind," reached No. 4 and their third, "Moving," put them back at No. 1.
Yarrow, Stookey and Travers took an eight-year hiatus to focus on their individual careers, but reunited in 1978 for an anit-nuclear-power concert. "Survival Sunday" was organized by Yarrow in Los Angeles. The moment brought the trio back together until Travers' death in 2009. Since then, Stookey and Yarrow have performed both together and separately.
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The singer-songwriter was born in New York. Yarrow was introduced to music at a young age, first learning violin and then guitar. He later graduated from Cornell University in 1959.
"I saw these young people at Cornell who were basically very conservative in their backgrounds opening their hearts up and singing with an emotionality and a concern through this vehicle called folk music," he said. "It gave me a clue that the world was on its way to a certain kind of movement, and that folk music might play a part in it and that I might play a part in folk music."
Yarrow is survived by his wife, Marybeth, son Christopher, daughter Bethany and granddaughter Valentina.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.