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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 tradition 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.
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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.
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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 precursor 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 |
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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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