Puff, the Magic Dragon

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Puff, the Magic Dragon

Written by Leonard Lipton and Peter Yarrow, 1959

This beloved song began almost by accident. In 1959, a nineteen-year-old Cornell University student named Leonard Lipton had been reading Ogden Nash’s playful 1936 poem “The Tale of Custard the Dragon,” about a timid little pet dragon. Lipton, who was studying physics and didn’t think of himself as a poet, decided he could write a better dragon poem. He dropped by the off-campus house where a fellow student named Peter Yarrow lived, sat down at Yarrow’s typewriter, and tapped out a poem about a dragon named Puff and his young friend Jackie Paper, who shared adventures in a land by the sea. Then, with exams on his mind, he left the page in the typewriter and walked away.

Yarrow found the poem, loved it, and finished the job. He wrote more verses to give the story a beginning, middle, and end, and he composed the gentle melody we know today. At the heart of the song is a tender idea: a child grows up and leaves his imaginary friend behind, and the friend is left missing him. Lipton later said the story was really a lot like Peter Pan.

A couple of years later, Yarrow joined Paul Stookey and Mary Travers to form Peter, Paul and Mary. They sang “Puff” in their concerts, recorded it in 1962, and released it in January 1963. It climbed to number two on the Billboard Hot 100, spent two weeks at number one on the easy-listening chart, and even reached the top ten on the R&B chart. It became one of the trio’s most enduring songs and later inspired a series of animated television specials, beginning in 1978.

Meanwhile, Lipton had no idea his poem had become a hit. A friend finally called to tell him that Yarrow was trying to find him. When they reconnected, Yarrow gave him full credit as co-writer and an equal share of the royalties. That generosity changed Lipton’s life. The royalties helped fund his interest in filmmaking, and he went on to become a pioneer of 3D movie technology. Much of the modern 3D projection you may have seen at the theater traces back to his inventions. He died in 2022 at eighty-two.

And now for the scandal. By the mid-1960s, a rumor had spread that this sweet children’s song was secretly about smoking marijuana. People pointed to the dragon’s name, the word “paper,” and other supposed clues. Both men denied it for the rest of their lives. Yarrow insisted the song was about the loss of childhood innocence and nothing more. After all, the poem was written in 1959, years before the drug culture that people imagined into it. In his later years, Yarrow often changed one line so that it spoke of girls as well as boys, so every child in the room could see themselves in the story.