In the spring of 1973, one could not turn on a radio without the voices of Tony Orlando and Dawn emerging from it, singing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ’Round the Ole Oak Tree.” The song was then ubiquitous, as catchy as bronchitis—and just as hard to get rid of. Everyone from Bing Crosby to Frank Sinatra to Lawrence Welk covered it, and it could heard emanating from musical decanters, jewelry boxes, and ceramic tchotchkes. If one listened closely, one could hear conch shells playing it.
The song concerns a returning prisoner who, after a three-year term of incarceration, eagerly watches from a bus window to see if his beloved will welcome him home—the sign being a yellow ribbon. Should that bit of fabric be absent, he’d “stay on the bus / Forget about us / Put the blame on me.” Anyone who bothered to listen through to the end of the record know that it ends happily for the ex-convict, with a hundred yellow ribbons on the tree rather than just the one.
The composer of the song, L. Russell Brown, backpedaled on the prison angle, stating that the story was based on a folk tale of a Union solder returning from a Confederate POW camp during the Civil War. And the song (and those yellow ribbons) have been used to welcome home captives from the 1979-80 Iran hostage crisis, and to greet service personnel coming home after their overseas deployments. All of which, of course, is
