Song of the Day 1/10: Peter, Paul and Mary, “Puff, the Magic Dragon”

Peter Yarrow, who died earlier this week at age 86, fought a decades-long battle against an insidious rumor: that “Puff, the Magic Dragon” was about marijuana.

In his defense, Yarrow pointed out that he wrote the song while an undergraduate at Cornell in 1959, a time and place where marijuana was still rare. The story began as a poem written by a fellow student, Leonard Lipton, who later gained fame as the inventor of the technology used in movie theaters for 3-D films.

The 19-year-old Lipton was inspired by “The Tale of Custard the Dragon” by Ogden Nash, the mid-century’s finest purveyor of comic doggerel. Lipton thought he could do better and came up with the story of Puff, using Yarrow’s typewriter to get it on paper. Yarrow massaged it into lyrics and wrote the music; Lipton was unaware of it until years later, when he was told Yarrow was looking for him so he could share songwriting credit and royalties.

Both men went to their graves denying any connection to drugs, despite the boy’s name being Jackie Paper and “puff” and “drag” being descriptions of smoking. The capstone to the theory: “Honah Lee” is a close homophone of Hanalei, Hawaii, supposedly the source of a potent strain of cannabis. Lipton blamed a sardonic item by newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen for starting the rumor, pointing out that it would be pretty nasty to write a children’s song about drug-taking.

Something the marijuana theory never mentions: If it’s about toking up, by song’s end Jackie Paper has quit the habit. Or maybe he just switched to a bong.