Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Puff, the Magic Dragon
Summary
"Puff, the Magic Dragon" (or just "Puff") is a song written by Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary from a poem by Leonard Lipton. It was made popular by Peter, Paul and Mary in a 1962 recording released in January 1963.
Lipton wrote a poem about a dragon in 1959, and when Yarrow found it, he wrote the lyrics to "Puff" based on the poem. After the song was released, Yarrow searched for Lipton to give him credit for the song.
The lyrics for "Puff, the Magic Dragon" are based on a 1959 poem by Leonard Lipton, then a 19-year-old Cornell University student. Lipton was inspired by an Ogden Nash poem titled "The Tale of 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 moves on from the imaginary adventures of childhood, leaving a disheartened Puff on his own. The song's story takes place "by the sea" in the fictional land of "Honah Lee".
Lipton was friends with 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 received royalties to the song until his death in 2022.
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", to be fair to boys and girls. The original poem also had a stanza that was not incorporated into the song. In it, Puff found another child and played with him. Neither Yarrow nor Lipton remembers the verse in detail, and the paper left in Yarrow's typewriter in 1959 has since been lost.
Cash Box described it as "a charming folk tune, about a magic dragon, right-up-the-vocal-alley of the remarkably successful folksters."
After the song's initial success, speculation arose—as early as a 1964 article in Newsweek—that the song contained veiled references to smoking marijuana.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.