Puff, the Magic Dragon

Written by Leonard Lipton and Peter Yarrow, 1959 (poem) / 1962 (song)

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“Puff, the Magic Dragon” was born on a borrowed typewriter. In 1959, a nineteen-year-old Cornell physics student named Leonard Lipton was struck by an Ogden Nash poem about a “realio, trulio little pet dragon” and wandered over to the house of his friend Peter Yarrow. Nobody was home, so Lipton helped himself to the typewriter, banged out a poem about a dragon named Puff and a boy named Jackie Paper — and then walked out and forgot all about it, leaving the page sitting in the machine. Yarrow found it, added his own lines (including the “frolic in the autumn mist” imagery) and set it to music. When Peter, Paul and Mary released it in January 1963, it rocketed to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Yarrow then went looking for his old friend, who by then was working as a camp counselor, and gave him half the songwriting credit — a handshake of remarkable decency that has paid Lipton royalties ever since.

Then came the rumor. Starting around 1964, after a Newsweek story about hidden drug messages in pop music, people decided the song was secretly about marijuana — “puff,” “paper,” “dragon.” Both writers spent the rest of their lives swatting it down. Lipton pointed out the obvious flaw in the theory: at Cornell in 1959, nobody was smoking grass. Yarrow put it more bluntly, saying it’s easier to read “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a drug song. The song is exactly what it appears to be — a small heartbreak about a child growing up and leaving his imaginary friend behind. Two odd postscripts: the original poem had an extra verse, left out of the song, in which Puff finds a new child to play with; and during the Vietnam War, American airmen nicknamed the AC-47 gunship “Puff the Magic Dragon” — surely the strangest afterlife any children’s song has ever had.