Puff The Magic Dragon

This song was rumored to be about drugs, particularly marijuana. This rumor was fueled by a 1964 Newsweek article about hidden drug messages in pop music that came up with the following interpretations:

Puff's friend Jackie Paper = rolling papers
"Puff" = to take a puff from a joint
"Dragon" = a variation of "dragin'," as in taking a drag from a joint to inhale the smoke.

The band claims that the song is really about losing the innocence of childhood, and has nothing to do with drugs. At the end of the song, Puff goes back into his cave, which symbolizes this loss of childhood innocence.

Peter Yarrow wrote this in 1958 before he joined the group. He wrote it after coming home and seeing a poem on his typewriter with words about the dragon. He based his song on this poem, which was written by Lenny Lipton. A few years later when this became a hit, Yarrow found Lipton and gave him half the songwriting credit. Lipton, who was a camp counselor when Yarrow found him, gets extensive royalties from the song.

For his book Behind The Hits John Javna spoke with Lenny Lipton about his poem. Lipton was feeling homesick when he wrote it. One day, he was on his way to dinner at a friend's house, and was a little early, so he stopped at the library and happened to read some Ogden Nash poems.

The title of the poem that grabbed him was The Tale Of Custard The Dragon, which is about a "Really-o Truly-o Dragon." Lipton was friends with Peter Yarrow's housemate when they were all students at Cornell University. On the walk from Cornell's library to the friend's house (where he was to eat dinner), he wrote the poem, which was about the loss of childhood. But no one was home when he arrived - there was some sort of mix-up about dinner. So he just went in and used Yarrow's typewriter to get the poem out of his head. Then, he forgot about it. Years later, a friend called and told him Yarrow was looking for him, to give him credit for the lyrics. Lipton had actually forgotten about the poem.

The original poem 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 remember the verse in any detail, and the paper that was left in Yarrow's typewriter in 1958 has since been lost.

In an effort to be gender-neutral, Peter Yarrow later sang the line "A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys" as "A dragon lives forever, but not so girls and boys."