Musician Peter Yarrow performs Saturday evening at Barnes & Noble Booksellers at Crocker Park for an audience that included children as well as adults familiar with his music career of nearly 50 years (West Life photo by Larry Bennet)

Folk singer Peter Yarrow continues social activism
Children's book gives 'Puff' a new playmate
By Kevin Kelley
Westlake
Published July 16, 2008

Peter Yarrow of the famed folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary entertained scores of children and adults who grew up with his music Saturday evening at a performance at Barnes & Noble Booksellers at Crocker Park.

In addition to performing for children, whom he insisted sit in front of the crowd, Yarrow addressed the adults on social issues he’s been involved with for years.

Yarrow, 70, performed “Don’t Laugh At Me,” written by Steve Seskin and Allen Shamblin. The song, a plea for tolerance and mutual respect, has become the anthem of Operation Respect, a nonprofit group Yarrow started to combat bullying and other forms of humiliation in schools. The organization offers free educational resources on civility and conflict resolution to schools for grades two to five and six through eight on its Web site, www.operationrespect.org.

The program engages kids to break the mindset that creates hate, he said. Yarrow told West Life that it’s imperative to teach respect for others at an early age.

“Adults — you can’t change their hearts,” he said.

Yarrow told the audience of about 300 of just returning from Vietnam, where he visited babies in hospitals who were born with severe birth defects stemming from the U.S. military’s use of the chemical Agent Orange during the war there.

Yarrow said America owes the Vietnamese an apology for the damage caused during the war.

Yarrow, who was a prominent demonstrator against the war in the 1960s and has been to Vietnam twice before, was there under the auspices of The Fund For Reconciliation and Development, an organization that seeks to normalize relations with nations that have had military conflicts with the U.S.

His activities there will be the subject of a television documentary to be broadcast next spring, most likely on public television, he said.

Yarrow also sang “Don’t Let the Light Go Out,” which became a protest song in the 1980s in the effort to free Jews oppressed in the former Soviet Union.

He closed by singing “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” the bittersweet song about a boy who befriends a dragon only to one day outgrow his playmate.

But in recent years, Yarrow has written a new ending in which the boy, Jackie Paper, returns to visit Puff with his daughter, who becomes a new playmate for the dragon.

In an interview with West Life, Yarrow acknowledged that the song had perhaps too sad an ending and needed “clarification and resolution.”

Yarrow’s 2007 children’s book “Puff, the Magic Dragon” contains the original words of the 1959 song he wrote with Lenny Lipton. However, illustrations by Eric Puybaret show Puff playing with Jackie’s daughter at the book’s end.

(Barnes & Noble Booksellers at Crocker Park still has several copies of the book signed by Yarrow available for purchase.)

It’s been a couple of years since he’s performed with Mary Travers and Noel “Paul” Stookey, Yarrow said. However, the trio was scheduled to begin rehearsals this week for a fall tour that will include new material, he said.

Folk music was pushed out of popular music for many years, Yarrow said. However, he believes folk is seeing a resurgence thanks to Internet sites such as MySpace that allow artists to promote their music directly to fans.

“People still yearn for the substance of what folk offers,” Yarrow told West Life.

While Yarrow has had his share of commercial success in the music industry, he also sees music as a means of creating a sense of community among people.

Yarrow is currently working on “The Peter Yarrow Songbook,” a series of four books and CDs of folk and related music. The first two — “Favorite Folk Songs” and “Sleepytime Songs” — are scheduled to be released in November.