Maryland State Archives

NPR, All Things Considered, January 25, 1997 · - During the hostage crisis the song 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Old Oak Tree' by Tony Orlando and Dawn became a huge hit, with the yellow ribbon becoming a symbol for the hostages freedom. This past week, the composer of that song, Irwin Levine, died at the age of 58. And we have this remembrance.

Source: The American Folklife Center
http://www.loc.gov/folklife/ribbons/ribbons.html

How the Yellow Ribbon Became a National Folk Symbol
by Gerald E. Parsons
This article was originally printed in the Folklife Center News in the summer of 1991 (Volume XIII, #3, pp. 9-11). At that time the Persian Gulf War had inspired Americans to decorate their lapels and their front porches with yellow ribbons for the soldiers sent into combat, once again generating a storm of questions to librarians and folklorists about the origin of the custom. An article written ten years earlier, just after the Iran hostage crisis, Yellow Ribbons: Ties with Traditions, is also available on this site.
The late Gerald E. Parsons was a folklorist and a librarian in the Folklife Reading Room for twenty-one years. [IMAGE: laingden320.jpeg uploaded to ADD NOTES - CAPTION: Penne and Bruce Laingen with the yellow ribbon Mrs. Laingen tied around the oak tree in her front yard in 1979 when her husband was held hostage in Iran. Mrs. Laingen donated the ribbon to the Library of Congress in 1991. Photo by Greg Jenkins.]
During the last decade, no single form of expression documented in the Archive of Folk Culture has stimulated more letters, more phone calls, more in-person inquiries than the yellow ribbon. The questions began in 1981 when the Library of Congress received a blizzard of inquiries, particularly from the news media, about the history of yellow ribbons then being displayed everywhere in America in support of Americans being held hostage in Iran. The basic question that reporters had in mind was how the symbol came into being. Many callers had ideas of their own on the subject; some had interviewed the authors of relevant popular songs; others had spoken to wives of hostages in Iran in 1980-81. Still others had talked to historians of the Civil War.
Eventually a body of information accumulated, and I wrote an article for Folklife Center News entitled "Yellow Ribbons: Ties with Tradition" (volume IV, no. 2, April 1981). The article outlined the symbolic use of the ribbons in story, song, and real life; and the Folklife Center staff made good use of the article this year [1991], ten years after its publication, when a second blizzard of questions came in about the ribbons displayed for soldiers serving in the Persian Gulf.
Is the custom of displaying yellow ribbons for an absent loved-one a genuine American tradition? That question was, and remains, "number one" on the American Folklife Center's hit parade of yellow ribbon reference inquiries. Often this same question has been asked in a more focused form: People will say, "Is this a Civil War tradition?" --as if an association with that central experience in American history would certify its authenticity.
In the last year or so, we of the reference staff at the Center have become aware of a certain shift: a movement from asking about a Civil War connection to asserting one. Some assertions on this subject have verged on the pugnacious; nearly all have made reference to the song "Round Her Neck She Wore A Yellow Ribbon." That song was recorded for the Archive of Folk Culture in 1938 by Sidney Robertson Cowell in California, but it is much older. For example, there is a Philadelphia printing from 1838 that copies still older British versions. Indeed in the last act of Othello, Desdamona sings one of the song's lyric ancestors.
One version or another of "Round Her Neck She Wore A Yellow Ribbon" has been popular now for four hundred years; so it would not surprise me to learn that someone sang it sometime during the Civil War. All I can say for sure, however, is that it was sung in a movie that was set in the western United States at a time just after the Civil War--a 1949 release starring John Wayne and Joanne Dru. In fact, Round Her Neck She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (the movie) took its title from the song. This film remains the only demonstrable connection between yellow ribbons and the Civil War that has come to my attention, and that a rather weak one.
If the custom of wearing or decorating with or displaying yellow ribbons doesn't trace to the Civil War, where does it come from? It begins, as far as I can tell, not as a custom at all, and not as a song. It begins as a folk tale--a legend, actually. Here it is in the earliest version I've found:
It is the story of two men in a railroad train. One was so reserved that his companion had difficulty in persuading him to talk about himself. He was, he said at length, a convict returning from five years' imprisonment in a distant prison, but his people were too poor to visit him and were too uneducated to be very articulate on paper. Hence he had written to them to make a sign for him when he was released and came home. If they wanted him, they should put a white ribbon in the big apple tree which stood close to the railroad track at the bottom of the garden, and he would get off the train, but if they did not want him, they were to do nothing and he would stay on the train and seek a new life elsewhere. He said that they were nearing his home town and that he couldn't bear to look. His new friend said that he would look and took his place by the window to watch for the apple tree which the other had described to him.
In a minute he put a hand on his companion's arm. "There it is," he cried. "It's all right! The whole tree is white with ribbons."
That passage comes from, of all places, a 1959 book on prison reform. The title is Star Wormwood, and it was written by the eminent Pennsylvania jurist Curtis Bok. Bok says it was told to him by Kenyon J. Scudder, first superintendent of Chino penitentiary. I take this information as evidence that the story was in oral tradition as early as the mid-1950s. I note also the implication of a certain occupational interest in the tale.
During the 1960s, the returning prisoner story appeared in religious publications and circulated in oral tradition among young people active in church groups. In this environment, both the versions that appeared in print and those collected from oral tradition highlighted similarities to the New Testament "Parable of the Prodigal Son."
In October of 1971, Pete Hammill wrote a piece for the New York Post called "Going Home." In it, college students on a bus trip to the beaches of Fort Lauderdale make friends with an ex-convict who is watching for a yellow handkerchief on a roadside oak. Hammill claimed to have heard this story in oral tradition.
In June of 1972, nine months later, The Readers Digest reprinted "Going Home." Also in June 1972, ABC-TV aired a dramatized version of it in which James Earl Jones played the role of the returning ex-con. One month-and-a-half after that, Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown registered for copyright a song they called "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree." The authors said they heard the story while serving in the military. Pete Hammill was not convinced and filed suit for infringement.
One factor that may have influenced Hammill's decision to do so was that, in May 1973, "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" sold 3 million records in three weeks. When the dust settled, BMI calculated that radio stations had played it 3 million times--that's seventeen continuous years of airplay. Hammill dropped his suit after folklorists working for Levine and Brown turned up archival versions of the story that had been collected before "Going Home" had been written.
In January 1975, Gail Magruder, wife of Jeb Stuart Magruder of Watergate fame, festooned her front porch with yellow ribbons to welcome her husband home from jail. The event was televised on the evening news (one of the viewers was Penne Laingen). And thus a modern folk legend concerning a newly released prisoner was transformed into a popular song, and the popular song, in turn, transformed into a ritual enactment. Notice that Jeb Stuart Magruder's return to his home exactly parallels the situation in both the folk narrative and the popular song. The new development, at this point, was that Gail Magruder put the story into action.
The next big step was to make the ribbon into an emblem--not for the return of a forgiven prodigal--but for the return of an imprisoned hero. And that step was Penne Laingen's: On November 4, 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy in Teheran and held Ambassador Bruce Laingen and the rest of the embassy staff hostage.
Six weeks later, on December 10, the Washington Post printed two short articles by Barbara Parker: "Coping With `IRage'" and "Penne Laingen's Wait." The first article began "Americans are seething" and went on to quote psychologists concerning the widespread and intense emotional distress caused by the hostage crisis. The article presented a helpful list of things to do to "vent irage": "ring church bells at noontime . . . organize a neighborhood coffee to discuss the crisis and establish one ground rule only: no physical violence . . . play tennis and `whack the hell' out of the ball . . . offer family prayers or moments of silence . . . turn on car headlights during the day . . . send gifts to the needy `in the name of the hostages,'" and, of course, the old stand-by, "conduct candlelight vigils."
Then in the Post article come the words "Laingen, who has 'tied a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree'. . . suggests that as something else others might do." The article concludes with Penne Laingen saying, "So I'm standing and waiting and praying . . . and one of these days Bruce is going to untie that yellow ribbon. It's going to be out there until he does." According to my current understanding, this is the first announcement that the yellow ribbon symbol had become a banner through which families could express their determination to be reunited.
The next major step was to move the ribbon out of the Laingen's front yard and into most of the front yards in the United States. That move came about in a particularly American way. With a wonderful exhibition of the spirit that Alexis de Tocqueville thought was a cardinal virtue of our society, the hostage families met and formed an association: the Family Liaison Action Group (FLAG). FLAG quickly found allies among existing humanitarian organizations, most notably an organization called No Greater Love.
The goal of FLAG and its allies was to find a way to bring moral force to bear on behalf of the hostages. They seem to have formed their strategy around Emerson's maxim that "A good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands." The symbol they choose for their argument was, of course, the yellow ribbon. Aided by support from four AFL-CIO unions, No Greater Love made and distributed ten thousand "yellow ribbon pins." These went to union members, members of hostage families, college students, and in a stroke of marketing genius, to TV weather forecasters. Meanwhile FLAG sent the pins to Junior Chambers of Commerce, scouting organizations, and governors' wives.
Ultimately, the thing that makes the yellow ribbon a genuinely traditional symbol is neither its age nor its putative association with the American Civil War, but rather its capacity to take on new meanings, to fit new needs and, in a word, to evolve.
And it is evolving still. During the Persian Gulf Crisis, for example, there emerged a new impulse to combine yellow ribbons with hand-painted signs, American flags, conventional Christmas ornaments, seasonal banners, and other such elements to create elaborate, decorative displays--displays that one scholar has termed "folk assemblages."
Because the yellow ribbon is very much a living tradition, there is no way to tell who among us may help to steer its course, or in what direction. Last winter, I was in a distant city and needed to buy a spray of flowers. I found a flower shop and explained to the proprietress that I needed an arrangement that would be appropriate for a cemetery ornament. "And would you like some yellow ribbon to tie around it," she asked matter-of-factly.
Well, it's a long way from a folktale about an ex-convict's homecoming to an incipient funeral custom. I had to stop and think about that for a minute. But never one to thwart the evolution of a new American custom, I said, "Yes, ma'am. I will take some yellow ribbon. Thank you."
For further reading:
Jack Santino, "Yellow Ribbons and Seasonal Flags: The Folk Assemblege of War," Journal of American Folklore, 105, #1 (1992), pp. 19-33.
Tad Tuleja, "Closing the Circle: Yellow Ribbons and the Redemption of the Past," Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in North America edited by Tad Tuleja, Logan, Utah, Utah State University Press, 1997, pp. 311-328.

Source: American Family Traditions

http://www.americanfamilytraditions.com/yellow_ribbon.htm
Tie a Yellow Ribbon
Family Tradition
Display of a Yellow Ribbon is a sign of loyalty to family, friends or loved ones who are welcome home. Customarily it is used to welcome home men and women who have been away for a long time under adverse or particularly difficult circumstances such as war or prison.
Background
Did you ever wonder where the Yellow Ribbon Tradition came from? Most Music Historians trace the Custom to a 19th Century Civil War Song. Reportedly the Custom comes from a Civil War story about a prisoner's homecoming returning from Andersonville Prison. In 1973 Tony Orlando and Dawn cut their number one song of that year and their all-time classic: “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree.”
Folklore has it that the inspiration for the 1973 song came from a true incident that occurred on a bus bound for Miami, Florida. It seems that one of the passengers had just been released from prison and he was bound for home. He had written his wife and let her know he still loved her and wanted to be with her. He asked her to tie a yellow ribbon around the lone oak tree in the Town Square of White Oak, Georgia, if she still had feelings for him and wanted him to be with her. Everyone in the bus asked the Driver to slow down as they approached, there it was!
The Driver pulled over and phoned the wire services to share the story. It quickly spread throughout the country. Songwriters Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown wrote the ballad from the news story.
And now, "the rest of the story"! L. Russell Brown had the inspiration for writing the song. One late Spring morning he drove 33 miles to Irwin Levine's house and told him the story of the oak tree. It had nothing to do with any convict or news story. It was about a civil war soldier, a stagecoach and yellow (as Mr. Levine would say: "Use your imagination!") handkerchiefs. Irwin changed the yellow handkerchiefs to ribbons so as not to offend anyone with the reality of what makes handkerchiefs yellow! L. Russell Brown and and Irwin Levine updated the story by changing the stagecoach to a bus. L. Russell Brown picked up a guitar and wrote the first eight or so lines of music and lyrics himself. Irwin picked up the ball and wrote the ending: "100 ribbons round the ole oak tree". There was discussion about use of the word damn and then the ole song was written. According to L. Russell Brown: "Sorry Paul Harvey, but now you know the rest of the story"1.
“Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree” was released in February 1973. It was the number one hit by April 1973.
The song became a hit again in 1981 when the 52 Iran Hostages were returned after 444 days of captivity. The song was played throughout the United States because by then the Yellow Ribbon had become a symbol of loyalty.2,3,4,5
Credits

1 E-Mail from L. Russell Brown to American Family Traditions of 27 July 2001.
2 Irwin Levine Obituary
3 Hits of 1973
4 Edmonton Journal Sept 12, 1990, p. D16.
5 RQ Summer 1991, pp475-76
Lyrics
The Bruce Laingen Story

Source: The Straight Dope
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_008.html
Yellow ribbons first emerged as a national symbol in January 1981, when they sprouted like weeds to welcome home the Americans held hostage in Iran. The whole thing was started by Penelope (Penne) Laingen, wife of Bruce Laingen, U.S. charge d'affaires in Teheran. Ms. Laingen says she was inspired by two things: (1) the song "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree," written in 1972 by Irwin Levine and Larry Brown and made famous by Tony Orlando and Dawn, and (2) the prior example of one Gail Magruder. Ms. Laingen writes: "Gail Magruder, wife of Jeb Stuart Magruder of Watergate fame, put yellow ribbons on her front porch to welcome her husband home from jail. This event was televised on the evening news. "At this point ... I stepped in to change the legend and song from the return of a forgiven prodigal to the return of an imprisoned hero. Interestingly, I had remembered the Gail Magruder ribbons, but I had only a vague understanding of the Levine-Brown song lyrics, although I knew it involved a 'prisoner,' which my husband surely was in Iran." Penne's aim, and that of the other hostage families she was in contact with, was to keep public attention focused on the prisoners. Various ideas had been proposed or tried early on, including asking people to turn on their porch and car lights, honk their horns, ring church bells, display the flag, wear Vietnam-type POW bracelets, etc. But none of these schemes proved satisfactory. Finally Penne hit on yellow ribbons. She hung one made from yellow oilcloth on an oak tree in her front yard in December 1979, and mentioned it to a Washington Post reporter who was doing a story on how hostage families were dealing with stress. The reporter described what Penne had done in her article and yellow ribbons soon were appearing nationwide. When the buildup for the Persian Gulf war began the ribbons appeared anew and now appear to be firmly established as a symbol of solidarity with distant loved ones in danger. OK, but where did the song "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree" come from? At this point the ribbon story starts to get a little tangled. Larry Brown claimed he heard the returning-convict story on which the song was based in the army. Apparently it was a widely circulated urban legend--so widely circulated, in fact, that it got the songwriters into a bit of hot water. New York Post writer Pete Hamill had related the story in a 1971 column with a few different details--for one thing, the convict told his story not to a bus driver but to some college students headed for Fort Lauderdale. Hamill claimed he'd heard the story from one of the students, a woman he'd met in Greenwich Village. He sued Brown and Levine for stealing his work, but the defense turned up still earlier versions of the tale (Penne Laingen quotes a version from a book published in 1959) and the suit was dropped. A big difference in many of the earlier stories was that the centerpiece wasn't a yellow ribbon, it was a white ribbon or kerchief. But Levine claimed "white kerchief" wouldn't fit the meter, so yellow ribbon it became. In addition to being trochaic, yellow seemed "musical and romantic," he reportedly said. But it wasn't quite that simple. The 1949 John Wayne movie She Wore a Yellow Ribbon featured a hit song of the same name, and the line appears in a 1961 Mitch Miller songbook. A source who knows Brown and Levine says they (or at least Levine) privately admit they got the concept of yellow ribbons from the 1949 song. The movie tune was a rewrite of a song copyrighted in 1917 by George A. Norton titled Round Her Neck She Wears a Yellow Ribbon (For Her Lover Who Is Fur, Fur Away). This in turn was apparently based on the popular 1838 minstrel-show song All Round My Hat (surely you remember it), which sported the line, "All round my hat I [w]ears a green willow [because] my true love is far, far away." Doesn't scan (or parse) very well, which no doubt explains the switch to yellow ribbons in the twentieth century. Songs with green willows and distant lovers go back at least to 1578. It's interesting that the ribbons and willows in these songs simply serve as a reminder of a distant loved one, since that's pretty much the only significance of yellow ribbons today. There is no suggestion of the returning prodigal such as we find in the Levine-Brown song, or even of imprisonment, as was the case during the Iran hostage crisis. So I guess we can say that yellow ribbons do have some grounding in tradition, although it's ribbons rather than green willows chiefly as a metrical convenience. Contrary to popular belief, there is no indication that yellow ribbons had any symbolic value during the American Civil War. The notion that they did stems from the aforementioned John Wayne movie, which featured soldiers in Civil War-era uniforms.

Iran Hostage Anniversary
WASHINGTON, Jan. 18, 2001
Jimmy Carter spent his last minutes in office trying to end the 444-day Iran hostage crisis that many say cost him the presidency. He even took a telephone with him to Ronald Reagan's swearing in and was engaged in last-minute talks as the two drove up to the Capitol.
But it was the newly inaugurated President Reagan who made the announcement that afternoon - that the 52 American hostages had been released from Tehran and were coming home. Here's a recap of the hostage crisis in 1979 and 1980 that dominated U.S. headlines and captured popular interest:
In early 1979, conditions in Iran had started to deteriorate. Various factions were fighting to oust the Shah of Iran from power.
On Jan. 16, the shah, Muhammad Reza Pahlevi, whose regime had the support of the United States, announced that he was taking a short vacation. A new government had been formed to replace Pahlevi's military administration. The main opposition force, headed by the Ayatollah Khomeini, however, refused to join or cooperate with the new government.
Pahlevi then fled into exile, but was denied admission into the United States and temporarily settled in Egypt.
Weeks later revolutionaries loyal to Khomeini seized 70 employees at the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held them hostage for several hours to protest American involvement with the shah's regime.
As conditions in the Iranian capital grew more chaotic, the U.S. government evacuated families of embassy personnel. Other Americans still in the country were urged to leave Iran immediately.
On Oct. 22, 1979, the shah was allowed to enter the United States for gall bladder surgery, prompting a new round of protest in Iran.
On Nov. 4, 1979, thousands of students, demanding the return of the shah, overran the U.S. embassy and took about 90 people captive. Later, some were freed, including women, non-Americans and blacks.
As diplomatic efforts to free the hostages began, President Carter halted oil imports from Iran and froze Iranian assets in the United States, prompting yet another Iranian outburst of protest against America.
As negotiations continued into December, Penelope Laingen, wife of hostage Bruce Laingen, charge d'affaires of the embassy, tied a yellow ribbon around a tree at her home in Maryland, and a nationwide movement began. Millions of Americans also tied the yellow symbols of freedom around trees in their yards. (They stayed up until the hostages came home – more than a year later.)
A frustrated President Carter severed diplomatic relations with Iran and imposed a complete economic embargo with Iran in April 1980.
On April 24, Operation Eagle Claw, a top-secret mission to free the hostages, ended in disaster. At the outset of the operation, a helicopter developed engine trouble in a staging area of the Iranian desert. Eight Americans were killed as two planes collided during the subsequent withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Even the death of the shah in July di not persuade the ayatollah and students to free the hostages.
Iraq invaded Iran in Sept. 22, 1980, and a full-scale war ensued between the two nations, causing further problems with negotiations on the hostages.
The hostage crisis played a major role in the presidential campaign of 1980. President Carter was preoccupied with the situation and perhaps did not pay enough attention to his re-election campaign, opting instead for a Rose Garden strategy.
His opponent, Ronald Reagan, however, had created a network of informants within the government to give him advance warning of any changes in the hostage situation. Some accused him of exploiting the hostage crisis in his campaign.
As widely expected, Mr. Reagan beat Mr. Carter in the presidential election on Nov. 4, 1980.
Perhaps fearing the new incoming administration, Iran then began new negotiations to free the hostages. Iranians originally asked for $24 billion in return for the captives, but eventually lowered their demands.
On Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 1981, Iran agreed to accept $8 billion in frozen assets and a promise by the United States to lift trade sanctions in exchange for the release of the hostages.
After 444 days in captivity, the 52 hostages flew out of Tehran to the Wiesbaden Air Force Base in West Germany. The announcement was made minutes after President Reagan was sworn in.
And on Jan. 21, 1981 former President Carter, who had hoped to greet the hostages as his last official act, flew to West Germany as President Reagan's emissary to greet them.
The yellow ribbons came down.
By Alexandra Cosgrove © MMI Viacom Internet Services Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Tie a Yellow Ribbon Around the Old Oak Tree

I'm coming home I've done my time
And I have to know what is or isn't mine
If you received my letter
Telling you I'd soon be free
Then you'd know just what to do
If you still want me
If you still want me

Oh tie a yellow ribbon
'Round the old oak tree
It's been three long years
Do you still want me
If I don't see a yellow ribbon
'Round the old oak tree
I'll stay on the bus, forget about us
Put the blame on me
If I don't see a yellow ribbon
'Round the old oak tree

Bus driver please look for me
'Cause I couldn't bare to see what I might see
I'm really still in prison
And my love she holds the key
A simple yellow ribbon's all I need to set me free
I wrote and told her please

Oh tie a yellow ribbon
'Round the old oak tree
It's been three long years
Do you still want me
If I don't see a yellow ribbon
'Round the old oak tree
I'll stay on the bus, forget about us
Put the blame on me
If I don't see a yellow ribbon
'Round the old oak tree

Now the whole damn bus is cheering
And I can't believe I see
A hundred yellow ribbons
'Round the old, the old oak tree

Tie a ribbon 'round the old oak tree
Tie a ribbon 'round the old oak tree
Tie a ribbon 'round the old oak tree
Tie a ribbon 'round the old oak tree

Tie a ribbon 'round the old oak tree
Tie a ribbon 'round the old oak tree
Tie a ribbon 'round the old oak tree
Tie a ribbon 'round the old oak tree

Russell Brown/Irwin Levine Irwin Levine Music/ Larball Publishing Co. Inc. Plat. BMI

[IMAGE: yellowribbon.jpg uploaded in ADD NOTES CAPTION: Yellow ribbon flown in 1979 by Penne Laingen when her husband, US diplomat Bruce Laingen, was held captive during the Iran hostage crisis; among the first of the modern "yellow ribbons. Picture courtesy Library of CongressA yellow ribbon is symbolic of troops stationed away from home, especially if in combat. ]

A yellow ribbon is symbolic of troops stationed away from home, especially if in combat.

The symbol has since been adopted in civilian life for many kinds of people missing from their homes, popularized that way by the song 'Tie a Yellow Around the Ole Oak Tree', performed by Tony Orlando and Dawn Tony Orlando and Dawn was a pop music group that was very popular in the 1970s. Their signature hits were Candida, Knock Three Times, and Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Old Oak Tree.

In 1970, Tony Orlando was a failed cover singer. He had two Top 40 hits in the early 1960s but he did not have any success for the rest of the decade. He stopped singing entirely, publishing music for CBS records instead.

In October of 1971, [newspaper columnist] Pete Hammill wrote a piece for the New York Post called "Going Home." In it, college students on a bus trip to the beaches of Fort Lauderdale make friends with an ex-convict who is watching for a yellow handkerchief on a roadside oak. Hammill claimed to have heard this story in oral tradition.

In June of 1972, nine months later, The Readers Digest reprinted "Going Home." Also in June 1972, ABC-TV aired a dramatized version of it in which James Earl Jones played the role of the returning ex-con. One month-and-a-half after that, Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown registered for copyright a song they called "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree." The authors said they heard the story while serving in the military. Pete Hammill was not convinced and filed suit for infringement.

One factor that may have influenced Hammill's decision to do so was that, in May 1973, "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" sold 3 million records in three weeks. When the dust settled, BMI calculated that radio stations had played it 3 million times--that's seventeen continuous years of airplay. Hammill dropped his suit after folklorists working for Levine and Brown turned up archival versions of the story that had been collected before "Going Home" had been written. http://www.loc.gov/folklife/ribbons/ribbons.html Many kinds of colored ribbons have since been created and often worn on clothing to symbolize causes from Missing in action military personnel, to support for AIDS sufferers, to missing children.

In the United States military, the symbol of the yellow ribbon is used in this popular marching song, with lyrics altered from the song, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon written by Russ Morgan and performed by The Andrews Sisters.

The text of the Army version approximates the following, with local variations:

Around her hair she wore a yellow ribbon
She wore it in the springtime
And the merry month of May
And if you ask me why the heck she wore it
She wore it for her soldier who was far far away

Far away, far away
She wore it for her soldier
Who was far, far away
Around the block she pushed a baby carriage
She pushed it in the springtime
And the merry month of May
And if you ask me why the heck she pushed it
She pushed it for her soldier who was far far away

Far away, far away
She pushed it for her soldier
Who was far, far away

The words and meter were probably changed both for copyright and for cadence, as the lines are typically sung in time to the steps of the march by the Drill Instructor and responded to by the troops.

http://urbanlegends.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=urbanlegends&zu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.loc.gov%2Ffolklife%2Fribbons%2Fribbons_81.html

Yellow Ribbons: Ties with Tradition
By Gerald E. Parsons

This article was originally printed in the Folklife Center News in the summer of 1981 (Volume IV, #2), gathering together information compiled on the subject of Yellow Ribbons following the hostage crisis in Iran. A later article: "How the Yellow Ribbon Became a National Folk Symbol," published in 1991, is also available on this site.

The late Gerald E. Parsons was a folklorist and a librarian in the Folklife Reading Room for twenty-one years. If folklore were an exact science, we might have predicted the blizzard of inquiries about the traditionally of yellow ribbons–the ribbons that blossomed in January [1981] to welcome the American hostages home from Iran. Instead, the media storm caught us by surprise.

David Kelly of the Library's General Reference Reading Room was the first to notice the gathering force and frequency of press inquiries on the subject. On January 22 he made the rounds of the various public reference units to see if anyone knew anything about the yellow ribbon symbol. He drew a blank everywhere except in the Archive of Folk Song. There he found a file folder containing a two-year-old reference letter concerning the song "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree," and a certain skeptical willingness to study the matter further. Not the stuff of which doctoral dissertations are made, to be sure, but enough to certify the Archive as the Library's single voice on the matter. For the next two weeks the calls poured in and the reference staff of the Manuscript Division, General Reference Reading Room, Music Division, and Information Office directed them to the Archive of Folk Song.

The basic question which the news reporters had in mind was how the symbol came into being. Many callers had ideas of their own on the subject. Some had interviewed the authors of relevant popular songs. Others had spoken to historians of the Civil War. Still others had talked with the wives of hostages. Reporters often called the Archive and then called back later with a new hypothesis, a new historical fact, or a new lead to a book reference. Very quickly a kind of collegial feeling grew up between the Archive and some of the more persistent researchers. We found ourselves functioning not so much as authorities on the subject as members of an informal team of harried investigators.

In a few frenzied days, what our journalistic colleagues called "the story" was gotten out. As it has come back to us courtesy of the Library's clipping service (informally assisted by a number of devoted friends and relatives), we see that we have been liberally quoted in it. In fact, we were quoted even on the nationally televised CBS Evening News, which had the Archive's Reference Librarian associating the color yellow with "prostitution, disease, and cowardice." Mercifully, CBS permitted him to return later in the program with a more positive comment.

How did the yellow ribbon symbol become associated with the hostages? On the CBS broadcast of January 28, Penelope Laingen, wife of the U.S. Chargé d'Affaires in Tehran, Bruce Laingen, was shown outside her home in Bethesda, Maryland. "It just came to me," she said, "to give people something to do, rather than throw dog food at Iranians. I said, 'Why don't they tie a yellow ribbon around an old oak tree.' That's how it started."

Mrs. Laingen's source of inspiration was a popular song by Irwin Levine and L. (Larry) Russell Brown, copyrighted in 1972 under the title "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree." Recorded by some thirty different vocalists in the late 1970s, it sold millions of copies. The hit version was recorded by the popular vocal group Dawn featuring Tony Orlando. The song sketches the story of a convict riding the bus homeward after three years in prison. He tells the bus driver that he has written to his sweetheart asking her to tie a yellow ribbon on a roadside oak tree if she will have him back. The driver relates the story to other passengers and as the bus nears the tree everyone is on the edge of his seat. As the tree comes into view, the convict, unable to bear the sight should there be no ribbon in its branches, hides his eyes. Then a cheer goes up and he looks to see that, in fact, the tree is covered with yellow ribbons.

The authors of "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" have been asked frequently about the origin of their song. "'Larry had heard the story in the Army,'" said Levine in an interview reprinted in the Washington Post on January 27, 1981 (page B2). "'I liked it, so we tried it. We wrote it and put it on a cassette. But then we didn't like it–it just didn't work–so we threw it away. I wish I would have kept it so I could compare it to the other one, but I recorded over it.' But three weeks later, Levine said their song idea font had run dry, so they decided to take a second stab at 'Yellow Ribbon.' They rewrote it, rewrote the music, and were pleased."

In the Army story, according to Brown, the symbol was a "white kerchief," but "white" will not scan in the melody to which Levine and Brown set their lyric. Post staff writer Saundra Saperstein also talked with Levine, and her story on the front page of the January 27th issue quotes him as saying that they made the ribbons yellow because the color seemed "musical and romantic."

At least one person has come forward to challenge the origins that Levine and Brown claim for their song. On October 14, 1971, New York Post writer Pete Hamill published in a syndicated column a story based on the returning prisoner theme. The convict had been away for four years rather than three, and he tells his story not to the bus driver, but to friendly college students on their annual migration to the Fort Lauderdale beaches. Otherwise, the story is much like that given in the popular song. Hamill sued Levine and Brown whose attorneys turned to University of Pennsylvania folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein for assistance. Goldstein, together with his student Steven Czick, looked for prior versions of the story which would invalidate Hamill's claim to authorship. They found several such examples, and the suit was dropped. When Reader's Digest printed a condensed version of the Hamill column, "Going Home," which appeared on pages 64 and 65 of the January 1972 issue, he introduced it with the following headnote:

I first heard this story a few years ago from a girl I had met in New York's Greenwich Village. The girl told me that she had been one of the participants. Since then, others to whom I have related the tale have said that they had read a version of it in some forgotten book, or had been told it by an acquaintance who said that it actually happened to a friend. Probably the story is one of these mysterious bits of folklore that emerge from the national subconscious to be told anew in one form or another. The cast of characters shifts, the message endures. I like to think that it did happen, somewhere, sometime.

Hamill's story become the basis of a segment of the "Perpetual People Machine," an ABC-TV magazine-format program produced by Alvin H. Perlmutter and aired in 1972. James Earl Jones played the part of the returning prisoner.

To summarize the ground covered thus far: it appears that the plot of the song that inspired Penne Laingen is drawn from modern urban oral tradition, while the choice of the yellow ribbon as symbol is conditioned by requirements of versification. But beyond these requirements, there remains another possible source for Levine and Brown's adoption of the yellow ribbon. In 1949 Argosy Pictures released a motion picture starring John Wayne and Joanne Dru which was called She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. The picture was popular and the theme song, "(Round Her Neck) She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," became a song hit. The composers for the movie were M. Ottner and Leroy Parker. Not surprisingly, their lyrics make reference to the characters and events in the film. But, in one form or another, this song long predates the movie. It has been registered for copyright a number of times, the earliest claim for it being the composition of George A. Norton in 1917. Norton gave as his title "Round Her Neck She Wears a Yeller Ribbon (For her Lover Who Is Fur, Fur Away)." It has been reported as a college song in the 1920s and 1930s, in which environment it displayed much variation, both in its symbology and in its suitability for public expression. Frank Lynn's Songs for Swingin' Housemothers (San Francisco: Fearon publishers, 1963, p. 42) provides a verse typical of the college type:

Around her knee, she wore a purple garter;
She wore it in the Springtime, and in the month of May,
And if you asked her why the Hell she wore it,
She wore it for her Williams man who's far, far away.

Other emblematic appurtenances of the young lady include a baby carriage and a shotgun wielding father. The color of her ribbon or garter could be varied in order to implicate a student of an appropriate college: crimson for Harvard, orange for Princeton, and so on. It was a slightly refined version from this college tradition, rather than the movie theme song, that became a great favorite on the early 1960s television show "Sing Along with Mitch." It appears on pages 22 and 24 of the Sing Along with Mitch Songbook (New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1961), where an accompanying headnote describes it as an "old army marching song (based on a traditional theme)." Although the second verse is essentially the "purple garter" type, the first verse begins "Around her neck, she wore a yellow ribbon."

It seems likely that Mitch Miller's popular printing a decade after the motion picture helped to foster the perhaps mistaken idea that wearing a yellow ribbon as a token of remembrance was a custom of the Civil War era. Letters expressing personal recollections and family stories of ribbons being displayed by wives and sweethearts of men in the U.S. Cavalry have reached the Archive of Folk Song. It is curious, however, that the half dozen anthologies of Civil War songs in our reading room do not offer "Round Her Neck" as a popular song. Furthermore, Civil War historian Shelby Foote was quizzed on the subject, but could not recall any reference to the practice of wearing yellow ribbons (Washington Post, January 27, 1981). Although it is perfectly plausible that the families of Union army troops did adopt such a token, prudent historiography would demand evidence from a diary, photograph, or source contemporary to the war. So far, no such evidence has come to our attention, and we must keep open to the possibility that the distant recollections of the Civil War have been grafted onto the symbolism of a much later popular motion picture. Occurrences of this sort are often noticed in the study of folk balladry in which the anachronistic combinations are among the more interesting features of the genre.

This sheet of song lyrics is a version of the lyrics to All Round My Hat published by Aunder and Johnson (Philadelphia, n.d.), a song that appears to be a precurser of the song Round Her Neck She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. This image is found in the online presentation, America Singing: Nineteenth Century Song Sheets. [Image uploaded to ADD NOTES]

Whether Levine and Brown were consciously or unconsciously influenced by "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" is not known. But if they were, it would be worth noting that the song that influenced them has a pedigree in tradition that stretches far beyond the college environment of the 1920s. In A History of Popular Music In America (New York: Random House, 1948, p. 83-84), Sigmund Spaeth writes that a similar song was heard in minstrel shows in this country around 1838:

About this time there appeared from the press of George Endicott ("Lithographer, Pianofortes, Music") a strange dialect song called All Round My Hat, which is unquestionably the ancestor of the later Round Her Neck She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, with all its variants and imitations. The original, "written by J. Ansell, Esq." (John Hansell) and "composed and arranged by John Valentine," "as sung by Jack Reeve, with the most Unbounded Applause," pictures an English vegetable-peddler, with an overloaded little donkey, pictorially on the cover and almost as vividly in the text. The chorus, with its curiously familiar close, runs as follows:

All round my hat, I vears a green villow,
All round my hat, for a twelvemonth and a day;
If hanyone should hax, the reason vy I vears it,
Tell them that my true love is far, far away.

(The temptation to repeat "far away" in the modern style is almost irresistible.)

The Philadelphia printing is evidently copied from a British source. In his annotation of "All Round My Cap" in the English Journal of the Folk-Song Society (vol. 8, no. 34, 1930, pp. 202-204), A. Martin Freeman describes the above chorus as "the sole relic of an earlier song, seized up, together with its engaging tune, to provide sport in the music-halls and be whistled by every errand-boy, for it became one of the most popular street songs of a hundred years ago" (the 1830s). That "earlier song" to which Freeman alludes can be traced almost three centuries further back into English tradition. It was printed in Thomas Proctor's Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions, published in 1578 (pages 83 to 86 in the 1926 Harvard University Press printing edited by Hyden E. Rollins), and Shakespeare has Desdemona refer to it as an old song (Othello, Act IV, scene 3).

In its long descent from Tudor lyric to Cockney ballad to American minstrel ditty to ribald college song to motion picture theme to popular recording, it may be seen that green willows have faded into garters and ribbons of every hue and that the symbol of constancy in love has been anything but constant itself. Peter Kennedy remarks in his Folksongs of Britain and Ireland (London: Cassell, 1975, p. 343):

Wearing a flower or, as in All Round My Hat, a green willow, were demonstrative symbols of faithfulness and chastity, and many of our love songs make use of the symbols of flowers and trees. Over the years the early significances have been forgotten and the symbols have sometimes changed their meanings. Green laurel has stood for young love, or fickleness, but also faithfulness, and has even been associated with Irish political loyalty.

In that flickering light, the transformation of a willow garland into a yellow ribbon seems natural enough. At the same time, it would be difficult to argue on the basis of evidence in the history of the song that the yellow ribbon has any claim to being a traditional symbol.

Folklorists who have had occasion to discuss the matter with the Archive staff have been bothered by two decidedly untraditional aspects of the yellow ribbon. First, the color seems expressly contrary to tradition. We have already noted that yellow seems to have appeared in the two popular songs that bear on this for reasons of scansion rather than to evoke ancient associations. The discussion of color symbolism in Charles Platt's Popular Superstitions (London: H. Jenkins, 1925) suggests that white might have been a more appropriate choice, and indeed, in at least two versions of the returning prisoner story taken from oral tradition the symbol is a white ribbon or kerchief.

The second aspect that makes folklorists reluctant to view this as a traditional expression is the matter of structural inversion. In the song "Tie a Yellow Ribbon...," the theme is that of a returning prodigal begging forgiveness–and receiving it. The former hostages, however, returned home as heroes.

For all the journalistic interest in it, the yellow ribbon story yields few facts of the sort we would like to find on page one of the morning edition. To be sure, the dates and title of the various printings can be reported with confidence, but the relevance of these publications to the spectacular expression of welcome that occurred this past January remains unclear. The account given above cannot be regarded as more than a preliminary statement focused on the genetic relationship between the ribbon symbol and two songs that moved back and forth, as we have seen, between folk and popular culture. It omits many suggestions and references to other, and perhaps even more interesting, lines of inquiry that have come to us from far and wide. For all of the effort of the dozens of people who have furthered the research on the subject, the viability of the yellow ribbon as a traditional symbol is still an open question. The Archive of Folk Song eagerly solicits further comments and will be most happy to share our files with anyone who wishes to study the matter in depth.

It would not be possible to thank everyone who has contributed thoughts or references to the Archive's burgeoning yellow ribbon file. Among those who have been most generous, however, are: Thomas Ahern (Associated Press), Elizabeth Betts (intern, Archive of Folk Song), Jennifer Bolch (Dallas Times Herald), Hal Cannon (State of Utah, Division of Fine Art), Kathy Condon (George Washington University), Harold Closter (Smithsonian Institution), Susan Dwyer-Schick (Pennsylvania State University), Austin and Alta Fife (Utah State University, retired), Kenneth S. Goldstein (University of Pennsylvania), Archie Green (University of Texas), Wayland Hand (University of California, Los Angeles), Paul Michele and Julie Miller (interns, Archive of Folk Song), Jack Santino (Smithsonian Institution), Saundra Saperstein (Washington Post), Jennifer Siebens (CBS Evening news), and Bert Wilson (Utah State University)

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QUOTE WHERE MRS. LAINGEN MENTIONS THE WYE OAK

"I've been wondering, too, how the other trees in the area have fared, trees I also festooned with yellow ribbons during that crisis, such as the Wye Oak in Eastern Maryland, the Sam Rayburn Oak and a Wisconsin red oak on the Capitol grounds, a white oak on the grounds of the Naval Academy in Annapolis and a Georgia maple (in honor of President Jimmy Carter) at the White House. Bruce and I have an almost mystical attachment to our lovely oak, so -- like Mr. Engelman -- "even the forecast of a thunderstorm makes us edgy.'"

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