Banned Songs: Puff the Magic Dragon

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Can you stand TWO Kentuckians in a row? That’s what we have here! And will you look at this, a third Kentuckian on the list of songs that got banned?? What’s in our water? Here’s today’s great song you (even you, Daddy Evil) can sing along with! Puff the Magic Dragon - Peter, Paul, and Mary When I did the series of famous Louisvillians, the late Mary Travers was on the list. She’s the one who kept Peter and Paul from sounding like the name of a candy company. And everybody knows this one. And, if you’re of a certain age, you’ve heard how this is nothing but a code song for marijuana. That’s what the older generation said. (And they’re always right, right? ) Leonard Lipton, who wrote the poem that became the lyrics, blamed Dorothy Kilgallen for starting the rumor, given that it was an unnamed “New York City columnist” who made the claim in Newsweek. (Kilgallen was a panelist on What’s My Line, and famously announced on a Friday that, come Monday, she was going to drop a “bombshell” about JFK’s assassination. She died that Sunday night under circumstances that even a NON-conspiracy theorist would call “suspicious.”) Listen, I’m old, but I remember the days of when getting home and crawling into the blanket fort was THE most important thing of the day. There’s a Facebook meme that says something about “I’m not adulting today…if you need me, I’ll be in my blanket fort with my coloring books.” Yeah, those days. One day — and none of us remembers the exact day it happened — you get home and you’re “too busy” to make the blanket fort, or you go outside instead, or you do something else. Next thing you know, you’ve forgotten how to make a blanket fort. That’s what this song is about. We can understand it because we had this song in comic strip form (Calvin and Hobbes). Anyone with half a brain understands that; and, if anyone made any references to this song being about marijuana (with little Jackie Rolling Paper leading the way ), they were WRONG. It didn’t stop people from saying it…or others from believing it. As a result, a song that’d even inspired toy dragons was suddenly out of rotation. And that’s incredibly sad, because the people who did the complaining probably never realized this song was about them and how they “came no more” to the innocence of things in life. Puff the Magic Dragon Written by Leonard Lipton and Peter Yarrow Recorded by Peter, Paul, and Mary From Moving, 1963 Reason banned: rumored to be about marijuana Green scales fell like rain: