This tunes' from One Touch of Venus - Ogden Nash wrote the lyrics - My bad P&S, I'll go change that....YAY! Kurt Weill!!

By the way for all you would-be content creators on YT-I made this segment from a larger upload (complete concert) on YT by grabbing that video with the YTD Video Downloader then used the handy VLC media player record feature (shift+R) to record the segment I wanted from the download-Works dandy and it works for free.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'natalie, merchant, poetry, poems, leave your sleep' to 'natalie, merchant, poetry, poems, leave your sleep, ogden nash, ee cummings' - edited by oxdottir

Oh the joy of someone singing the poems of ee cummings an ogden nash. This made my day. It makes me so sad that so far the sifters don't appreciate it.
*happy

No, "Puff, the Magic Dragon" is not about marijuana, or any other type of drug. It is what its writers have always claimed it to be: a song about the innocence of childhood lost.


The poem that formed the basis of the song "Puff, the Magic Dragon" was written in 1959 by Leonard Lipton, a nineteen-year-old Cornell student. Lipton was inspired by an Ogden Nash rhyme about a "Really-O Truly-O Dragon," and, using a dragon as the central figure, he came up with a poem about the end of childhood innocence. Lipton passed his work along to a friend, fellow Cornell student (and folk music enthusiast) Peter Yarrow, who put a melody to the words and wrote additional lyrics to create the song "Puff, the Magic Dragon." After Yarrow teamed up with Mary Travers and Paul Stookey in 1961 to form Peter, Paul & Mary, the trio performed the song in live shows; their 1962 recording of "Puff" reached #2 on the Billboard charts in early 1963.


The 1960s being what they were, however, any song based on oblique or allegorical lyrics was subject to reinterpretation as a "drug song," and so it was with "Puff." (For Peter, Paul & Mary, at least, the revelation that their song was "really" about marijuana came after the song had finished its chart run; other groups were not so fortunate, and accusations of "drug lyrics" caused some radio stations to ban songs such as the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" from their playlists.) "Puff" was an obvious name for a song about smoking pot; little Jackie Paper's surname referred to rolling papers; "autumn mist" was either clouds of marijuana smoke or a drug-induced state; the land of "Hanah Lee" was really the Hawaiian village of Hanalei, known for its particularly potent marijuana plants; and so on. As Peter Yarrow has demonstrated in countless concert performances, any song — even "The Star-Spangled Banner" — can be interpreted as a "drug song."


http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/puff.asp