Confident the 1960’s ended up outrageous situations. The period has come to be synonymous with drug use and lots of tracks from that era have been tainted with the suggestion that they are about medicines. Was Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds seriously a code for LSD? (John Lennon normally denied this accusation expressing the title was influenced by a photo his son experienced drawn and named.) Did the Byrds Eight Miles Higher refer to an plane journey or a different style of flight? The greatest shock of them all was the realization that Puff the Magic Dragon was genuinely a track about smoking cigarettes cannabis.
When a single seems to be at the lyrics it is easy to see how this story spread. The name of the music was quite blatant. Puff was yet another phrase for using tobacco and dragon could be broken up into two terms for the time period drag on. He took a puff off of the pipe and a drag on the joint. Furthermore, what did men and women who smoke cannabis made use of to make their joints? Papers. And what was the identify of the tiny boy is the track? It was Little Jackie Paper. Some have even prompt that the magic land of Hanah Lee was actually Hanalei a Hawaiian village renown for its powerful brand of grass.
However the writers of the track claim that Puff The Magic Dragon was tune about the loss of innocence and a young boy who outgrew his childhood techniques. The track commenced its existence as poem composed by a 19 yr previous Cornell University pupil, Leonard Lipton. He confirmed the poem to his good friend Peter Yarrow who put the poem to a melody and extra extra lyrics. Yarrow went on to variety the band Peter, Paul and Mary and their rendition of Puff went to Number Two on the charts.
It was not until finally after the song has its operate on the charts that the principle about it being a drug track arrived to gentle. It is a idea that nevertheless exists today in spite of the authors’ quite a few community statements to the contrary. Lipton claimed is poem was primarily based on the Ogden Nash poem “Genuinely-O, Truly-O Dragon”. He wrote that “[It is about] the reduction of innocence and acquiring to confront the grownup environment. It’s absolutely not about medication. I can tell you that at Cornell in 1959 no a single smoked grass… It would be insidious to propagandize about dugs in a track for minimal young children”.
Peter Yarrow would afterwards increase the subsequent comment: “When Puff was prepared I was much too harmless to know bout prescription drugs. What variety of a suggest-spirited SOB would create a kid’s track with a covert drug concept?”