How the Yellow Ribbon Became a National Folk Symbol

by Gerald E. Parsons

This article was originally printed in the Folklife Center News in the summer of 1991 (Volume XIII, #3, pp. 9-11). At that time the Persian Gulf War had inspired Americans to decorate their lapels and their front porches with yellow ribbons for the soldiers sent into combat, once again generating a storm of questions to librarians and folklorists about the origin of the custom. An article written ten years earlier, just after the Iran hostage crisis, Yellow Ribbons: Ties with Traditions, 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.

During the last decade, no single form of expression documented in the Archive of Folk Culture has stimulated more letters, more phone calls, more in-person inquiries than the yellow ribbon. The questions began in 1981 when the Library of Congress received a blizzard of inquiries, particularly from the news media, about the history of yellow ribbons then being displayed everywhere in America in support of Americans being held hostage in Iran. The basic question that 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 wives of hostages in Iran in 1980-81. Still others had talked to historians of the Civil War.

Eventually a body of information accumulated, and I wrote an article for Folklife Center News entitled "Yellow Ribbons: Ties with Tradition" (volume IV, no. 2, April 1981). The article outlined the symbolic use of the ribbons in story, song, and real life; and the Folklife Center staff made good use of the article this year [1991], ten years after its publication, when a second blizzard of questions came in about the ribbons displayed for soldiers serving in the Persian Gulf.

Is the custom of displaying yellow ribbons for an absent loved-one a genuine American tradition? That question was, and remains, "number one" on the American Folklife Center's hit parade of yellow ribbon reference inquiries. Often this same question has been asked in a more focused form: People will say, "Is this a Civil War tradition?" --as if an association with that central experience in American history would certify its authenticity.

In the last year or so, we of the reference staff at the Center have become aware of a certain shift: a movement from asking about a Civil War connection to asserting one. Some assertions on this subject have verged on the pugnacious; nearly all have made reference to the song "Round Her Neck She Wore A Yellow Ribbon." That song was recorded for the Archive of Folk Culture in 1938 by Sidney Robertson Cowell in California, but it is much older. For example, there is a Philadelphia printing from 1838 that copies still older British versions. Indeed in the last act of Othello, Desdamona sings one of the song's lyric ancestors.

One version or another of "Round Her Neck She Wore A Yellow Ribbon" has been popular now for four hundred years; so it would not surprise me to learn that someone sang it sometime during the Civil War. All I can say for sure, however, is that it was sung in a movie that was set in the western United States at a time just after the Civil War--a 1949 release starring John Wayne and Joanne Dru. In fact, Round Her Neck She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (the  movie) took its title from the song. This film remains the only demonstrable connection between yellow ribbons and the Civil War that has come to my attention, and that a rather weak one.

If the custom of wearing or decorating with or displaying yellow ribbons doesn't trace to the Civil War, where does it come from? It begins, as far as I can tell, not as a custom at all, and not as a song. It begins as a folk tale--a legend, actually. Here it is in the earliest version I've found:

It is the story of two men in a railroad train. One was so reserved that his companion had difficulty in persuading him to talk about himself. He was, he said at length, a convict returning from five years' imprisonment in a distant prison, but his people were too poor to visit him and were too uneducated to be very articulate on paper. Hence he had written to them to make a sign for him when he was released and came home. If they wanted him, they should put a white ribbon in the big apple tree which stood close to the railroad track at the bottom of the garden, and he would get off the train, but if they did not want him, they were to do nothing and he would stay on the train and seek a new life elsewhere. He said that they were nearing his home town and that he couldn't bear to look. His new friend said that he would look and took his place by the window to watch for the apple tree which the other had described to him.

 

In a minute he put a hand on his companion's arm. "There it is," he cried. "It's all right! The whole tree is white with ribbons."

That passage comes from, of all places, a 1959 book on prison reform. The title is Star Wormwood, and it was written by the eminent Pennsylvania jurist Curtis Bok. Bok says it was told to him by Kenyon J. Scudder, first superintendent of Chino penitentiary. I take this information as evidence that the story was in oral tradition as early as the mid-1950s. I note also the implication of a certain occupational interest in the tale.

During the 1960s, the returning prisoner story appeared in religious publications and circulated in oral tradition among young people active in church groups. In this environment, both the versions that appeared in print and those collected from oral tradition highlighted similarities to the New Testament "Parable of the Prodigal Son."

In October of 1971, Pete Hammill wrote a piece for the New York Post called "Going Home." In it, college students on a bus trip to the beaches of Fort Lauderdale make friends with an ex-convict who is watching for a yellow handkerchief on a roadside oak. Hammill claimed to have heard this story in oral tradition.

In June of 1972, nine months later, The Readers Digest reprinted "Going Home." Also in June 1972, ABC-TV aired a dramatized version of it in which James Earl Jones played the role of the returning ex-con. One month-and-a-half after that, Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown registered for copyright a song they called "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree." The authors said they heard the story while serving in the military. Pete Hammill was not convinced and filed suit for infringement.

One factor that may have influenced Hammill's decision to do so was that, in May 1973, "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" sold 3 million records in three weeks. When the dust settled, BMI calculated that radio stations had played it 3 million times--that's seventeen continuous years of airplay. Hammill dropped his suit after folklorists working for Levine and Brown turned up archival versions of the story that had been collected before "Going Home" had been written.

In January 1975, Gail Magruder, wife of Jeb Stuart Magruder of Watergate fame, festooned her front porch with yellow ribbons to welcome her husband home from jail. The event was televised on the evening news (one of the viewers was Penne Laingen). And thus a modern folk legend concerning a newly released prisoner was transformed into a popular song, and the popular song, in turn, transformed into a ritual enactment. Notice that Jeb Stuart Magruder's return to his home exactly parallels the situation in both the folk narrative and the popular song. The new development, at this point, was that Gail Magruder put the story into action.

The next big step was to make the ribbon into an emblem--not for the return of a forgiven prodigal--but for the return of an imprisoned hero. And that step was Penne Laingen's: On November 4, 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy in Teheran and held Ambassador Bruce Laingen and the rest of the embassy staff hostage.

Six weeks later, on December 10, the Washington Post printed two short articles by Barbara Parker: "Coping With `IRage'" and "Penne Laingen's Wait." The first article began "Americans are seething" and went on to quote psychologists concerning the widespread and intense emotional distress caused by the hostage crisis. The article presented a helpful list of things to do to "vent irage": "ring church bells at noontime . . . organize a neighborhood coffee to discuss the crisis and establish one ground rule only: no physical violence . . . play tennis and `whack the hell' out of the ball . . . offer family prayers or moments of silence . . . turn on car headlights during the day . . . send gifts to the needy `in the name of the hostages,'" and, of course, the old stand-by, "conduct candlelight vigils."

Then in the Post article come the words "Laingen, who has 'tied a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree'. . . suggests that as something else others might do." The article concludes with Penne Laingen saying, "So I'm standing and waiting and praying . . . and one of these days Bruce is going to untie that yellow ribbon. It's going to be out there until he does." According to my current understanding, this is the first announcement that the yellow ribbon symbol had become a banner through which families could express their determination to be reunited.

The next major step was to move the ribbon out of the Laingen's front yard and into most of the front yards in the United States. That move came about in a particularly American way. With a wonderful exhibition of the spirit that Alexis de Tocqueville thought was a cardinal virtue of our society, the hostage families met and formed an association: the Family Liaison Action Group (FLAG). FLAG quickly found allies among existing humanitarian organizations, most notably an organization called No Greater Love.

The goal of FLAG and its allies was to find a way to bring moral force to bear on behalf of the hostages. They seem to have formed their strategy around Emerson's maxim that "A good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands." The symbol they choose for their argument was, of course, the yellow ribbon. Aided by support from four AFL-CIO unions, No Greater Love made and distributed ten thousand "yellow ribbon pins." These went to union members, members of hostage families, college students, and in a stroke of marketing genius, to TV weather forecasters. Meanwhile FLAG sent the pins to Junior Chambers of Commerce, scouting organizations, and governors' wives.

Ultimately, the thing that makes the yellow ribbon a genuinely traditional symbol is neither its age nor its putative association with the American Civil War, but rather its capacity to take on new meanings, to fit new needs and, in a word, to evolve.

And it is evolving still. During the Persian Gulf Crisis, for example, there emerged a new impulse to combine yellow ribbons with hand-painted signs, American flags, conventional Christmas ornaments, seasonal banners, and other such elements to create elaborate, decorative displays--displays that one scholar has termed "folk assemblages."

Because the yellow ribbon is very much a living tradition, there is no way to tell who among us may help to steer its course, or in what direction. Last winter, I was in a distant city and needed to buy a spray of flowers. I found a flower shop and explained to the proprietress that I needed an arrangement that would be appropriate for a cemetery ornament. "And would you like some yellow ribbon to tie around it," she asked matter-of-factly.

Well, it's a long way from a folktale about an ex-convict's homecoming to an incipient funeral custom. I had to stop and think about that for a minute. But never one to thwart the evolution of a new American custom, I said, "Yes, ma'am. I will take some yellow ribbon. Thank you."

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 traditionally 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.

The online presentation California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties includes a recording and transcript of the song "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon" performed by Mrs. Byron Coffin, Sr. Select this link for the transcript of the lyrics. Select this link for the audio recording

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.

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.