Louise T. Guinther

The death of Peter Yarrow, one third of Peter, Paul and Mary, has hit me particularly hard. I always admired the trio, both for their beautiful all-American folk sound and for their equally American message of social justice and calls to activism. Their causes ranged from civil rights to anti-war and anti-nuclear protests to Operation Respect, a nonprofit that aimed to prevent bullying in schools.

On a more personal note, family lore has it that my parents met Peter Yarrow briefly back in the ’60s, as his wife was in the next bed over in the maternity ward when my mother was having us. (Don’t fact-check me on that: it might have been Paul Stooky’s wife instead.) And there’s no question that Yarrow was, at least in part, responsible for one of the most hysterical meltdowns of my life. When I was about five, my parents took my sister and me to dinner at the Sea Spray Inn in East Hampton, where a nameless folk singer/guitarist had been hired to entertain the children on the front porch. No, it wasn’t Peter Yarrow, but this supposedly child-friend entertainer chose to regale us with Yarrow’s masterpiece, “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Now, I have always had a thing for dragons. I also suffer from a Peter Pan complex and consider growing up to be one of the great tragedies of life. The combination of the abandonment of poor Puff and the transformation of the happy-go-lucky boy Jackie Paper into a fun-less adult set off a fit of weeping that required my immediate removal from the porch and very nearly caused us to go home without any dinner. I have since learned to flee whenever I hear the opening lines of that song. It doesn’t do to get dehydrated at my advanced age.

The world has lost a lot of important people in the past year (not least among them my mother) — people representative of a generation that took responsibility for their actions and their lives, modeled grace under pressure and faced up to challenges, both personal and national, with courage, humility and patience. Yarrow was one of those. He believed in changing hearts and minds the gentle way — through music and connection, rather than shock and awe. 

“I saw these young people at Cornell,” he said, referring to his early days as a psychology student and music teaching assistant at the prestigious university, “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’s daughter summed up her father’s spirit in a statement just after his death: “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.”

Though I cannot join you in watching it, for fear of another meltdown, I leave you with this great contribution to the young and young in heart all over the world. Bring your hankies!