Released January 1963 Recorded 1962 Length 3:20 | Format Vinyl single Genre Folk, pop Label Warner Music Group | |
"Puff, the Magic Dragon" (or "Puff") is a song written by Leonard Lipton and Peter Yarrow and made popular by Yarrow's group Peter, Paul and Mary in a 1963 recording.
Contents
Lipton wrote the complete lyrics, Yarrow found and used them, and later gave Lipton the credits.
Lyrics
The lyrics for "Puff, the Magic Dragon" were based on a 1959 poem by Leonard Lipton, a 19-year-old Cornell University student. Lipton was inspired by an Ogden Nash poem titled "Custard the Dragon", about a "realio, trulio little pet dragon."
The lyrics tell a story of the ageless dragon Puff and his playmate, Jackie Paper, a little boy who grows up and loses interest in the imaginary adventures of childhood and leaves Puff to be with himself. (The line "A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys" is generally thought to imply only that "little Jackie Paper" grew up.) The story of the song takes place "by the sea" in the fictional land of "Honalee".
Lipton was friends with Peter Yarrow's housemate when they were all students at Cornell. He used Yarrow's typewriter to get the poem out of his head. He then forgot about it until years later, when a friend called and told him Yarrow was looking for him, to give him credit for the lyrics. On making contact Yarrow gave Lipton half the songwriting credit, and he still gets royalties from the song.
In an effort to be gender-neutral, Yarrow now sings the line "A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys" as "A dragon lives forever, but not so girls and boys." The original poem also had a verse that did not make it into the song. In it, Puff found another child and played with him after returning. Neither Yarrow nor Lipton remembers the verse in any detail, and the paper that was left in Yarrow's typewriter in 1958 has since been lost.
In 1961, Yarrow joined Paul Stookey and Mary Travers to form Peter, Paul and Mary. The group incorporated the song into their live performances before recording it in 1962; their 1962 recording of "Puff" reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and spent two weeks atop the Billboard easy listening chart in early 1963. It also reached number ten on Billboard's R&B chart. More importantly, however, "Puff" joined several other PP&M hits of the same era ("If I Had a Hammer", "Where Have All The Flowers Gone", and "Blowin' In the Wind" among them) to become standards of American musical culture, the best-known and most widely loved examples of the folk-song genre that virtually all Americans know by heart and can sing along to.
Adaptations
A 1978 animated television special, Puff the Magic Dragon, adapted the song. It was followed by two sequels, Puff the Magic Dragon in the Land of the Living Lies and Puff and the Incredible Mr. Nobody. In all three films Burgess Meredith voiced Puff. In December 2016, it was announced that Fox Animation will produce a live-action/animation film based on the song with Mike Mitchell as director.
The song was adapted for a children's pantomime, which played at Sydney's Seymour Centre in 1983.
A 2007 book adaptation of the song's lyrics by Yarrow, Lipton, and illustrator Eric Puybaret gives the story a happier ending with a young girl (presumed by reviewers to be Jackie Paper's daughter) seeking out Puff to become her new companion. The lyrics remain unchanged from the Peter Paul and Mary version; the young girl is only seen in the pictures by illustrator Puybaret. On the last page of the book, she is introduced to Puff by an older Jackie Paper.
Both tune and elements of the lyrics were adapted in the controversial parody "Barack the Magic Negro", written and recorded by Paul Shanklin for Rush Limbaugh's radio program, after the term was first applied to then presidential candidate Obama by movie and culture critic, David Ehrenstein, in a Los Angeles Times op ed column of March 19, 2007. Yarrow condemned the act as "shocking and saddening in the extreme," stating that "taking a children's song and twisting it in such vulgar, mean-spirited way, is a slur to our entire country and our common agreement to move beyond racism… Puff, himself, if asked, would certainly agree."
In the mid 1970s an American Jewish band named Ruach created a parody version of the song entitled "Puff the Kosher Dragon". In the course of the song, Kosher Puff eats kosher food, has a Bar Mitzvah, fights anti-semites and finally marries and brings up his children as loyal members of the faith. The Ruach song has been noted as one of the first examples of a modern Jewish band using a popular secular tune.
The tune was used in the promotional LP Push the Magic Button for the track with the same name by Versatec, a computer printer company
Vietnam War
During the Vietnam War the AC-47 Spooky gunship was nicknamed the "Dragon" or "Dragon ship" by the Americans because of its armament and firepower – the nickname soon caught on, and one website without primary citations indicates that the American troops began to call the AC-47 "Puff the Magic Dragon".
In another Vietnam reference, Robert Mason's Chickenhawk states, in reference to the Peter, Paul and Mary song playing on a turntable: “Puff the Magic Dragon” was making me uncomfortable. It was the saccharine song that had inspired the naming of the murderous Gatling-gun-armed C-47s. I couldn’t listen.
International versions
A German version ("Paff, der Zauberdrachen") was recorded by Marlene Dietrich in 1963.
A Catalan translation ("Paf, el drac màgic") was popularized by the Grup de Folk supergroup on the 1967 EP "Escolta-ho en el Vent", becoming from then onwards one of the most popular children's songs in Catalan. It has also been played by, among many others, Joan Manuel Serrat.
A Hungarian version ("Paff, a bűvös sárkány") was performed by 100 Folk Celsius band in 1984.
A Korean version (Puff(펍)) was recorded by Yang Hee-eun in 1971.