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The song tells the tale of an immortal dragon named Puff and his adventures in the land of Honah Lee with his friend, Jackie Paper. Alas, adulthood strikes for Jackie, who matures and leaves Puff alone with his games because, as the lyrics go: “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys” (Yarrow later changed this to “girls and boys”).
After the tune’s initial success — it peaked at number two in the US charts — speculation arose that it was not, in fact, about the inevitable loss of innocence in children. A 1964 article in Newsweek proclaimed that “Puff” was actually a reference to smoking marijuana. Puff’s friend Jackie Paper was said to be a reference to “rolling papers”, and the land of Honah Lee was supposedly a euphemism for “hashish”. The cherry on the cake of the accusation was Puff himself, interpreted as a reference to “draggin’” — as in, taking a drag from a joint. “Puff” was considered in the same gang as tracks such as “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”; a New York Times reader wrote in 1984 that such songs were part of the “romanticisation of drugs in the ’60s”. The same reader judged that it was “disingenuous to use the song as a symbol of innocuous intent”.
The band broke up in 1970; in the same year, Yarrow, who died in January this year, was convicted of sexual abuse of a 14-year-old girl. He served three months in prison. He was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1981, the day before his presidency ended.
One unusual destination for this song was as a nickname for a powerful gunship aircraft, the AC-47 Spooky, used by the US in the Vietnam war. Airmen called it “Puff the Magic Dragon” because on night missions its guns spouted fire and smoke. An unlikely fan of the song is Elon Musk, who named a family of spacecraft after it, the SpaceX Dragon. “So many people thought I must be smoking weed to do this venture,” he said, thus perpetuating the purported link with marijuana.
But the song’s real message still rings true: the carefree innocence of childhood is to be protected, and is often over all too soon.
Let us know your memories of ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon’ in the comments section below
The paperback edition of ‘The Life of a Song: The stories behind 100 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Chambers
Music credits: Warner; Noel Paul Stookey; Classic
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