Some Tuesday Obits

 Obit: Peter Yarrow, 86, the "Peter" in the 1960s folk group Peter, Paul and Mary, has died. The cause was bladder cancer.

The group had many hits including one I despised and I think John Denver wrote, "Leaving on a Jet Plane."  That song was a huge hit when I was a freshman in high school in 1969-1970.  I would see people who were listening to that song and crying tears over it.  It made me want to puke.

It was released as a single for the group in 1969.  Denver did write it, composing it when he was 23 in 1966.

Most of the time, the group was okay.  As noted in the article, Yarrow got himself into big trouble back in 1970 to the point of serving some prison time for "taking indecent liberties" with a fourteen-year-old girl.  He was pardoned later on during the end of President Carter's term.

Of the trio, only Paul Stookey is still alive.  Mary Travers passed away in 2009.

Snip:

In their 1960s heyday, the group had six US Top 10 singles and one No 1, a cover of John Denver’s Leaving on a Jet Plane, as well as five Top 10 albums.

They were also politically significant. In August 1963, the progressive trio joined the March on Washington and sang a cover of Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which cemented the song’s legacy as an anthem of the civil rights movement.

Yarrow’s songs were often political, telling the story of a war objector on hunger strike in The Great Mandella, from 1967, and suggesting to his son, on Day Is Done, that his generation could make a better world.

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The world has one less fascist now that France's Jean-Marie Le Pen has died at the age of 96.

Snip:

Le Pen's supporters saw him as a charismatic champion of the every man, unafraid to speak out on hard topics.

And for several decades he was seen as France's most controversial political figure.

His critics denounced him as a far-right bigot and the courts convicted him several times for his radical remarks.

A Holocaust denier and an unrepentant extremist on race, gender and immigration, he devoted his political career to pushing himself and his views into the French political mainstream.

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