Near the end of “A Complete Unknown,” the Bob Dylan biopic that centers on his move into rock in 1965, an earnest, slim, bearded, clearly nervous M.C. struggles to pacify a wildly divided crowd that has just heard Dylan sing three plugged-in songs at the Newport Folk Festival. Boomers will immediately recognize that M.C. as Peter Yarrow, himself a festival headliner in the folk-revival trio Peter, Paul and Mary.
Yarrow, who died on Tuesday at 86, was also a member of the Newport Folk Festival board that had been striving to balance the event’s founding mission — bringing traditional music to a wider audience — with the preferences of that wider audience, which was more drawn to pop than purism. Among the festival organizers, Yarrow was an advocate for the topical songwriting and contemporary sounds that some old-line folk aficionados resisted. (According to “White Bicycles” by the producer Joe Boyd, who was running the sound system at Newport in 1965, Yarrow was also at the control board during Bob Dylan’s loud, divisive electric set, and refused to turn it down as other board members demanded.) And in the early, idealistic years of the folk revival, Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers (who died in 2009) strummed and harmonized their way toward that conscientious balance of folk and pop. It was sincere, and fleeting.
Peter, Paul and Mary — Stookey performed under his more biblical middle name — hit America’s cultural sweet spot in the early 1960s. They garnered radio hits and No. 1 albums by prettifying folk songs and smoothing out protest material from Dylan and Pete Seeger. They also made their politics clear by singing at the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights, and they brought out antiwar, anti-establishment subtexts in old songs like “Cruel War” and “If I Had My Way.”
Meanwhile, using lyrics from a college acquaintance, Yarrow wrote a lilting, enduring children’s song — “Puff (The Magic Dragon)” — that gained immeasurable mileage from what he always insisted was a misinterpretation: that it was about puffing marijuana.
Like pop groups before and since, the trio was the calculated project of its manager, Albert Grossman, who envisioned commercial possibilities for a folky harmony group with a woman and two men. He had approached other Greenwich Village figures — among them Dave Van Ronk and Carolyn Hester — before the trio’s lineup jelled in 1961.