Folk Singer Peter Yarrow Instills Sense of Community

Having spent the last 50 years writing and singing music about peace and harmony, Peter Yarrow still hasn’t lost his touch.

At his show Saturday night as part of the Sanctuary Concerts series at the , the singer who made up one-third of folk group Peter, Paul and Mary led his set with a message and a song about singing together, mentioning the importance of maintaining a sense of community and saying that “music speaks louder than words.”

Throughout the show, Yarrow firmly established this sense of community in various ways, befriending the audience and influencing them to not only enjoy the evening, but participate as much as they can.

From the outset, the 72-year-old Yarrow urged the audience to join him in singing the choruses of various songs, usually feeding the lines to some of his lesser-known tunes. He offered words of encouragement throughout, saying “if you forget the words…just read my lips.”

While singing the traditional folk song, “The Fox,” he even asked a few of the children in the audience to join him on stage and lead the rest of the crowd in a few of the song’s parts.

“I know talent when I see talent,” Yarrow said, as one of the children approached the stage.

Yarrow managed to maintain the sense of community even when getting sentimental and personal. Dedicating the song to the late Mary Travers, the female third of the famous folk group, Yarrow sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” asking the audience to join in by singing the melody of the chorus.

Yarrow explained that, when Travers died, he and Noel Stookey (better known as Paul) had similarly asked the crowd that had gathered for her funeral to join them in singing what he dubbed “Mary’s part” of the song. Now, he said, he does this at all of his shows.

A noted political activist through both song and action, Yarrow sang various emotionally charged tunes including anti-war songs and ones with messages of “a hope for a new tomorrow.”

“It’s great that there are people like him who have a conscience about things like this and want to do something about it,” audience member Larry Ray said after the show.

Yarrow did not isolate the sense of openness and community he established early on merely to the stage, though. Living up to the promise he made at the beginning of the show, he met and spoke with various members of the audience during intermission, signing and autographs and giving out hugs to anybody who spoke to him.

Seizing on Yarrow’s welcoming attitude, audience member Laurellie Jacobs Martinez sang to the signer what she described as an extra verse to “Puff, the Magic Dragon” that she and her best friend had written many years ago.

“As I was singing the verse to him, he looked in my eyes the whole time and gave me a kiss afterward,” Jacobs Martinez said. “It was very fulfilling for me.”

Yarrow played solo for the first hour of the performance. After the intermission, his daughter Bethany Yarrow and Rufus Cappadocia played a few songs together, including a bluesy version of “House of the Rising Sun,” made famous by the Animals in the 1960s.

Whereas Peter Yarrow is unarguably folk, his daughter straddles a talented line that separates folk, blues, pop and spiritual music.

A fine cellist, Cappadocia provided an amazingly full sound that was at times bluesy but consistently amazing and occasionally sounded as if multiple accompaniments were coming from just the single instrument.

The elder Yarrow then joined them on stage, ending the night with “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” the Bob Dylan-penned “Blowin’ in the Wind” and a medley of various folk tunes that included “This Land Is Your Land” and “This Little Light of Mine.”

“I recommend highly to sing with your children,” he said before performing their first song as a threesome, mentioning the high level of fulfillment one can get from the experience.

The crowd reacted most strongly during the rendition of “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” which Yarrow wrote in 1958, and did not miss a beat when asked to sing the song’s chorus.

From the very beginning of the show, Yarrow made it clear that he wanted to perform music for his audience well into the night.

“After this, we’ll go to my hotel room and sing until 3 a.m.,” he joked.