01/07/2025 Farm workers were among the causes championed by Peter Yarrow through Peter, Paul and Mary

We sadly learned of the passing of Peter Yarrow, 86, part of the famed folk music trio Peter, Paul and Mary. Among the many civil rights and anti-war causes he-and they-embraced was the farm worker movement spanning four decades. The trio headlined a 1969 benefit concert for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers at Carnegie Hall in New York City. In 1997, they spent a day helping the UFW organize strawberry workers around the California Central Coast farm town of Watsonville-before performing a benefit concert for the union at a packed civic auditorium in nearby Santa Cruz.

During that Pajaro Valley tour, Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers spent time with a field worker family in a run-down farm labor camp and then broke out in song amidst an adjacent strawberry field. They then sang before hundreds of farm worker and Latino children in Watsonville before the concert in Santa Cruz. Peter also authored a moving commentary piece about the farm workers' plight published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The trio featured Top 10 singles and albums, won five Grammys and helped expose Bob Dylan's early songs. They sang "Blowin' in the Wind" during the 1963 March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Mary Travers died in 2009, leaving Noel Stookey as the only surviving member of the trio.