Wednesday, January 08, 2025
Peter Yarrow, 1938-2025
As if on cue as the Bob Dylan movie I wrote about yesterday brought attention back to the folk scene of the early to mid-1960's, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary died this week. That's them in the video, singing a song that Pete Seeger wrote in 1949.
I remember these songs from the records (vinyl!) that my parents and their friends had and would play at dinner or parties. His father, Bernard, was a Ukrainian immigrant who came to the United States at age 23 and then went to Columbia and Columbia Law School. He was a prosecutor in New York under Thomas Dewey and then worked for Sullivan & Cromwell, a prominent firm.
[Just saying... this does not seem to be leading to raising a kid who a career in folk music, does it?]
Peter Yarrow grew up in New York and went to Cornell where he would have overlapped with my dad's time there, I think-- something I never realized. He later married Eugene McCarthy's niece in Wilmar, Minnesota and his bandmate Paul wrote this song for it:
And since everything around here recently comes back to clemency pretty quickly, Peter Yarrow received a pardon from Jimmy Carter, for the crime of taking "improper liberties" with a 14-year-old girl. He served three months in prison-- much less than he would likely have received today.
