With his acolytes from the famous folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, he enjoyed success in the midst of the protest movement in the 1960s in the United States: American musician Peter Yarrow died on Tuesday, according to his agent.
The latter announced to AFP that the 86-year-old artist had died in New York from bladder cancer against which he had been fighting for four years.
“Our indomitable dragon is tired and has begun the last chapter of its magnificent existence,” added his daughter Bethany, quoted in a press release.
“The world knows Peter Yarrow as an iconic folk activist, but the man behind the legend is everything generous, creative, passionate, playful and wise as his songs show,” she said. greeted.
Before falling from grace for making advances towards a minor, he burst onto the folk scene in New York in 1961 alongside Mary Travers – who died in 2009 at age 72 of leukemia – and Noel “Paul” Stookey. The year when the very young Bob Dylan arrived in the Greenwich Village district of Manhattan.
It was during this decade that the trio found success, riding the pacifist, anti-racist and progressive wave and the movement against the Vietnam War.
Peter Yarrow was born on May 31, 1938 in Manhattan to a family of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, before studying painting and turning to guitar and singing while a student at Cornell University.
The group’s first album in 1962, mixing folk roots and its more modern sound, sold two million copies.
Their interpretation of “Blowin’ in the Wind”, composed shortly before by Bob Dylan, punctuated the famous pacifist demonstration in Washington led by Martin Luther King on August 28, 1963.
The trio has won five Grammy Awards, including two for “If I Had a Hammer” by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays.
The three artists separated in 1970 before reforming at intervals between 1978 and the death of Mary Travers.
Peter Yarrow was also accused of making advances towards a 14-year-old girl who came to his dressing room to get an autograph.
He served three months in prison after pleading guilty to “indecency”. Pardoned by President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), he had to abandon a festival in New York in 2019 under pressure from the #MeToo movement, before presenting his “apologies” and expressing his “sorrow”.
Peter, Paul and Mary is known in France for several adaptations, including the song “500 Miles” which became “I hear the train whistle” by Richard Anthony.
