Story Behind the Song Archives - Page 9 of 9

Peter Paul & Mary’s First Contract . . . and Puff

Peter Paul & Mary signed their first recording contract on January 29, 1962. Thus began a recording career with Warner Brothers that would help bring folk music and Bod Dylan’s music to a broad audience.

That broader audience included me when I was a kid. We did not have Bob Dylan albums in my house when I was a kid, but we did have Peter Paul & Mary’s second album, Moving (1963), which included “Puff the Magic Dragon.” The trio and “Puff” eventually led me to Dylan and other folk singers. They even led me to John Denver with their cover of “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane.”

Although today I only have a couple of Peter Paul & Mary albums, I have a huge collection of Dylan and other folk songs that they helped me discover. So, while some hear them and think of a group less authentic than some other folk singers because of their smooth harmonies and the way the group formed, I hear the joy in their music. And I appreciate the role they played in my music education.

“Puff the Magic Dragon”

The story of “Puff the Magic Dragon” began in 1958 when Leonard Lipton, who was a Cornell student, found inspiration in Ogden Nash’s “The Tale of Custard the Dragon.” Lipton used that inspiration to write his own poem about a dragon.

Lipton showed his poem to another Cornell student, Peter Yarrow, who added music and additional lyrics. Not much later, Manager Albert Grossman, looking to capitalize on the growing folk music trend, put together what he saw as a commercial pairing of Yarrow with Peter Stookey and Mary Travers.

Thus began Peter Paul & Mary. The new group recorded “Puff the Magic Dragon” in 1962, and it went on to rise to #2 on the Billboard charts.

What is “Puff” About?

Several years after “Puff the Magic Dragon” was released, rumors started about drug references in the song. Yarrow and Lipton have both explained that the song is really about a loss of innocence, and Lipton has compared the story to Peter Pan on his blog.

Many decades on, the song’s themes about lost innocence resonate more strongly for those of us who grew up listening to the song. When I hear the song, I think not only about the lost innocence of Little Jackie Paper. I also think about my own childhood listening to the unusual dark children’s song. In the song, I sensed some frightening message about the world ahead where little boys do not live forever and dragons are left alone to disappear.

But in addition to the haunting elements, there was something comforting in the way the three voices blended together, revealing something else in the world. Perhaps there was a touch of the nearly half-century friendship between the three singers that continued until Mary Travers’s death in 2009.

And maybe some things do last forever. I do not know where I will be in another half century, but I do know that children still will be singing the college student’s poem about a dragon who frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honalee.

And that is The Story Behind the Song.

Update: Dick Kniss, who played bass for Peter Paul & Mary for almost five decades, passed away in 2012 at the age of 74. He also co-wrote John Denver’s hit, “Sunshine on My Shoulders.” RIP.

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Anniv. of Civil War’s Start: Elvis’s American Trilogy

On April 12, 1861, the first shots of the American Civil War were fired. In the early morning hours at 4:30 a.m., Confederate soldiers opened fire on the Federal Government’s Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay, South Carolina.

The state of South Carolina had seceded from the United States in December 1860 soon after Abraham Lincoln was elected president. By the time he took office in March, the situation at Fort Sumter was nearing a crisis and seven states had seceded.

Once the bombardment of Fort Sumter began on the morning of this date, it continued for 34 hours. And, on April 13 U.S. Major Robert Anderson surrendered the fort to Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard.

According to David Herbert Donald in the book Lincoln (1995), during the weeks between Pres. Lincoln’s inauguration and the first shots at Fort Sumter, the president was physically exhausted by stress. But there was some relief after this date. Because the first shots were fired by the Confederates, the rebels now had the burden of starting the war, not the North.

And after the first shots of the Civil War, Lincoln’s choices became clearer. Two days later, Pres. Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for volunteer soldiers. Within a week, Virginia voted to secede, and more states followed. The war would rage for the next four years.

Perhaps no song in recent history has attempted to encapsulate the Civil War era like “An American Trilogy,” a song that Elvis Presley performed regularly in concert toward the end of his life. The song was actually three popular American songs arranged by Mickey Newbury. It begins with the unofficial Confederate anthem “Dixie,” followed by the African-American spiritual, “All My Trials,” and closes with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the Yankee marching song.

What is the meaning of “An American Trilogy”? Paul Simpson’s The Rough Guide to Elvis notes that Mickey Newbury’s original intent is unclear, as the combination could have been about America’s lack of innocence or been intended ironically in reference to Pres. Nixon and the Viet Nam War.

For Elvis, “An American Trilogy” might have been about patriotism. But Charles Reagan Wilson wrote in Judgment and Faith in Dixie (1997) that Elvis’s “slow, reflective, melancholy” performances of the song in the 1970s “suggested an emotional awareness of the complex past of regional conflict and Southern trauma.”

In his excellent book Mystery Train (1975), critic Greil Marcus considered “An American Trilogy” to be Elvis’s attempt to combine all aspects of America and bring everyone together in a fantasy of freedom. But Marcus believed that Elvis’s song failed in that goal because the lack of complexity in the song creates “a throwaway America where nothing is at stake.” (p. 124.) For example, Marcus claimed, “There is no John Brown in his ‘Battle Hymn,’ no romance in his ‘Dixie,’ no blood in his slave song.”

Maybe Marcus wants too much out of a four-minute song. Yes, the song is gaudy in its performance, and Elvis’s jumpsuit is a long way from the soldiers and slaves. But as discussed in another Chimesfreedom post, John Brown is inherent in “Battle Hymn,” just as the romance is inherent in “Dixie,” and as blood is inherent in the dying in “All My Trials.”

There is another layer of confusion regarding the meaning of the song today because Elvis sings it. And Elvis, especially since his death, has become a complex American icon, as some consider him a revolutionary, some call him a thief, and some see him as a fat man steeped in excess. Yet perhaps the contradictions of Elvis, like the contradictions of the song, are the only way you can try to sum up the Civil War, in particular, and the complexity of America in general.

Finally, one additional complication is that what Newbury and Presley apparently thought was an African-American spiritual, was not. Many today believe that the center of the trilogy, “All My Trials,” which is also sometimes called “All My Sorrows,” has somewhat muddled origins. Many current scholars believe that the song was assembled from fragments of existing songs in the 1950s and set to the music of a lullaby from the Bahamas to make it sound like a traditional spiritual.

Newbury and Presley were not the only ones who thought it was an actual slave spiritual. In the 1950s, music critic Nat Hentoff wrote that it came from an African-American song, and in the 1960s, Joan Baez and others referred to the song as a slave spiritual.

So, there are more questions in “An American Trilogy” than answers. But on a day that started the deadliest war in our nation’s history, I prefer the people with questions over the armed generals who think they have the answers.

Bonus American Trilogy Version: For you Celebrity Apprentice fans, here is Meat Loaf singing “American Trilogy” at a 1987 tribute to Elvis Presley.

What do you think is the meaning of “American Trilogy”? Leave a comment.

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Lonely Street: The Sad Story Behind “Heartbreak Hotel”

On December 9, 1955, Elvis Presley performed “Heartbreak Hotel” for the first time, although he would not record the song until a month later in January 1956. The song would eventually become a hit, but many listeners did not know that the song came from a tragic story.

“It’s gonna be my first hit.”

According to Ernst Jorgensen’s Elvis Presley: A Life in Music, the performance on Dec. 9 was at a club near Swifton, Arkansas before a full house of 250 people. The 20-year-old Elvis was already a regional star but he had yet to appear on national television. Having just moved from Sun Records to RCA, he sensed he was on the brink of something big.

That night in the Arkansas club, he played the songs he’d recorded for Sun and a few covers. Then, he introduced the new song, “I”ve got this brand new song and it’s gonna be my first hit.”

He was right. “Heartbreak Hotel” became Elvis Presley’s first Gold Record, selling more than a million copies. Rolling Stone Magazine has it listed as one of the greatest fifty songs of all-time. And when then presidential candidate Bill Clinton made his famous appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1992, he chose “Heartbreak Hotel” to play on his sax.

There’s something joyous about the way the song sounds, despite its sad lyrics. But there’s an even darker story underneath the inspiration for the song.

The Suicide That Inspired “Heartbreak Hotel”

Mae Boren Axton wrote the lyrics for “Heartbreak Hotel.” At the time, she was a schoolteacher and songwriter who would later be the mother of country singer and actor Hoyt Axton. The son would grow up to star in Gremlins and write “Joy the the World” (“Jeremiah was a bullfrog…”) as well as another song that Elvis would later sing, “Never Been to Spain.”

One day in 1955, Mae Axton and her friend Tommy Durden read a story in the Miami Herald about a man who had committed suicide. The man had no identification, and he only left a note with a few words on it: “I walk a lonely street.”

Axton, inspired by the note, sat down and wrote the lyrics to “Heartbreak Hotel,” locating the hotel of heartbreak on the street where the man walked. Tommy Durden wrote the music, and the song was complete in only one hour.

Nobody remembers the name or the life of the unfortunate man who wrote the suicide note. And of course, he never got to see that his final act of great agony led to poetry — and to millions of people screaming joyously and dancing to his final words of despair.

I bet he would have liked to have seen it.