ALAN writes:

One day recently an old song came spontaneously out of the catacombs of memory and into my awareness.  Decades had gone by since I last listened to “Puff, the Magic Dragon” in its original recording by Peter, Paul, and Mary.  I remember when it was brand-new in 1963.  I knew who Peter, Paul and Mary were because one of my classmates and I enjoyed their song “Lemon Tree” in 1962.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the old days, 1954-’63.  When “Puff” became popular, I was in 7th grade at St. Anthony of Padua school.  I had left boyhood behind, but I could still enjoy a charming story-song like “Puff”.  How fondly I remember those nights in the warm, secure, and serene setting that my mother created for us in our modest apartment on Dewey Avenue in south St. Louis.  It was so long ago that I can remember seeing civilized human beings in that area. On such nights in 1963, “Puff, the Magic Dragon” was one of several favorite songs I would listen to before falling asleep.  It was a most agreeable way to top off the day.

Of course I took the song at face value. I could not have imagined in 1963 that the “true meaning” of its lyrics would become a matter of controversy in later years, with some contending it was really about smoking marijuana.

Did the lyrics mean what they appeared to mean — a story of boyhood days and an unlikely friendship — or were they code for something else? Or did the words represent both meanings simultaneously to different audiences?

It is unlikely that these questions will ever be answered definitively.

Lenny Lipton and Peter Yarrow, the song’s composers, claimed repeatedly that it was nothing more than a song about childhood innocence. Perhaps it was.

That claim might have been easier to credit if Peter, Paul, and Mary had not leaned toward radicalism and spoken and performed throughout their career in favor of many “Liberal” causes.  Not that any of that proves anything about the meaning of a song lyric.  It is conceivable that they spoke the truth about the song. It is also conceivable that the song’s composers lied about its meaning while feeling confident in the expectation that their general audiences would accept the song as representing the innocence of childhood while, at the same time, their “hip” audiences would take it as code for a drug habit.

(“Hip” as in “hippies”, who would rise to notoriety beginning in 1963-’64, a follow-up act to the Beatniks of the 1950s, who in turn would be followed a few years later by the yippies.  St. Louis housewife-turned-entertainer Charlotte Peters became very popular when she had her own daily TV program from 1954-1970.  But she was fired in 1970 after she expressed her disapproval of a “Yippie Festival” scheduled to be held in Forest Park at the same time when a Boy Scout Camporee was taking place there.  She was no fan of hippies or yippies and she never allowed any rock “music” on her program.  She was fired because she had the audacity to imagine she was still living in a free country and still possessed a right to speak her mind.  That the TV station sided with the yippies was proof that The Revolution had occurred.  No TV station would have sided with young rabble-rousers in 1960.)

Mary Travers also denied the song had any subversive meaning.  “Believe me,” she said about her colleague, “if Peter Yarrow wanted to write a song about marijuana, he would write a song about marijuana”—thereby suggesting that he had the savvy to do so, if he so desired.

I enjoyed “Puff, the Magic Dragon” immensely in 1963 and can still enjoy it in its straight meaning.  But I suggest nevertheless that its straight meaning provided plausible deniability for any simultaneous alternate meaning if its composers had had that intention in mind.

But maybe Peter and Mary and Lenny were right:  Maybe “Puff” was not about marijuana. Was it about opium?

In 1969, Sergeant James Huffman of the Piqua, Ohio, police department said:

“’Puff, the Magic Dragon’, a favorite children’s song, was written by a dope addict in relation to his dream-like states which he experienced from taking opium.”

[“Sgt. Huffman Lectures on Narcotics”, The Piqua Daily Call, Jan. 11, 1969, p. 6 ]

That is certainly a remarkable statement.  But how did he know it?  On what evidence did he base that statement?   Had he worked undercover in the narcotics division or did he know other officers who worked in that capacity and gleaned that information or that rumor?  In order to evaluate his statement, we must know all the details, which the newspaper did not report.  Hence, we cannot accept it or dismiss it.

The “dope addict” referred to by Sgt. Huffman would likely have been Lenny Lipton.  I have no idea whether he deserved that pejorative epithet.  He died last year at age 82 after what apparently was a long and productive career.  He and Peter Yarrow were students at Cornell University in 1959 when they composed “Puff, the Magic Dragon”.  They denied knowing anything about the drug subculture in those years.  That is possible.  But is it credible?  Is it credible that in the late 1950s-early 1960s and travelling in “Liberal” circles, they would know nothing about the use of certain drugs by “hip” musicians?

Peter, Paul, and Mary were talented entertainers whose recordings and concerts brought happiness and joy to countless audiences over a span of many years, most of whom were not hippies, druggies, or radical Leftists.

At the same time, I could not have disagreed more thoroughly with their advocacy of certain ideas and causes. I have read that when she was a teenager, Mary Travers sang with Pete Seeger, who of course was a lifelong proponent of making America over into a Communist Paradise, in which I presume all of us would own nothing and be happy.

In some of their concerts, Peter Yarrow addressed the controversy about the words in “Puff” and ridiculed the idea that they had any subversive meaning.  What he did not do was explain how so many of those words and phrases happened to be the same as those used in the drug subculture.  Maybe he couldn’t explain it because truth would not accommodate it.  There are too many coincidences.  Of course it stands to reason that if the lyrics were intended as drug-subculture lingo, then obviously Peter, Paul, and Mary would deny it in order not to jeopardize their record sales and popularity with their straight audiences.

That “Puff, the Magic Dragon” can be enjoyed as an innocent story-song for children is a point I happily concede.  The other question is:  Was it the only meaning intended?  That, I suggest, is wide open to debate.

— End of Initial Entry —

Laura writes:

It’s a lovely children’s ballad.

“Autumn mist,” “Jacky Paper,” “sealing wax,” “Cherry Lane,” — these are wonderful and evocative touches.

I think it stands on its own and this controversy should be laid to rest. I especially like the gentle way the trio played it in the above video. I can’t imagine children’s performers in our day appearing so dignified and calm. Today everything has to be hyper — as if children have no attraction to tranquility, melody and a story, as if they can only participate in art that’s sentimental, noisy and overtly fun.

Were some of the lyrics code for drug paraphernalia? Very possibly, but they can also be interpreted in another way and it’s not as if the song encourages drug use. If some people want to sing it while stoned, who cares?

Folk music has definitely been used to subvert and warp minds. Peter, Paul and Mary were, to some extent, part of a movement of “Marxist Minstrels” in the 60s and 70s.

But this song was beautiful and harmless. Parents should not worry about it.

(This is also the kind of song that can send a person around the bend if it’s played too much.)

Alan writes:

I agree with what you say about the dignity and calm displayed by Peter, Paul, and Mary, which was all to their credit.  The same sense of life and self-restraint were projected by other entertainers in those years like the men who portrayed the characters Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Green Jeans.  The trend toward hyper-commotion in children’s entertainment got under way in the mid-to-late 1960s.  It, too, was all part of The Revolution.  What is called entertainment for children today is abominable.

Laura writes:

Commotion — yeah, that’s it.

The enemy is beauty. Always has been.

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