The story behind the best-selling number one song of 1973
When the gonzo performance artist/comedian Andy Kaufman took the stage as his lounge singer alter ego Tony Clifton for a 1977 HBO special, he chose to serenade the audience with a terrible rendition of one of the decade’s most popular songs, a sentimental ditty called ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’.
If your intent was to be subversive, obnoxious, and confrontational, there probably wasn’t a better song to desecrate than this one. ‘Yellow Ribbon’ wasn’t just a ubiquitous radio hit, the best-selling number one US single of 1973 for the pop act Tony Orlando and Dawn, it had taken on a larger life as people around the world began adopting the yellow ribbon as a symbol of… well, a lot of things.
Families of soldiers on deployment in Vietnam and beyond began displaying a yellow ribbon on their lawn to show they were thinking of their loved ones; others used them as general decorations of hope, citing the uplifting nature of the song’s story of forgiveness.
During the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 and 1980, the yellow ribbon craze was taken to another level, as millions of Americans displayed the ribbons as a show of solidarity with 60 US hostages being held in Tehran. The song raced back up the charts, as well, becoming bizarrely politicised as anger grew with the US government and President Jimmy Carter’s failure to end the standoff.
A few years later, a political uprising in the Philippines adopted the practice of tying yellow ribbons around trees as a symbol of their anticipation for the return of their exiled leader, Ninoy Aquino. When Aquino was assassinated in 1983, the ribbons took on a new meaning as a symbol of the People Power Revolution in the country. And it all started with a pretty simple, old-fashioned song about an ex-con fresh out of prison, his girlfriend on the outside, and an oddly relatable story about feeling insecure after fucking up.
The tune itself came from the hitmaking team of Irwin Levine and L Russell Brown, who specialised in crafting story-driven pop songs in the early 1970s. According to Brown, the seed of the idea was pulled from a Reader’s Digest article about a prisoner returning home by bus and asking his family to show their forgiveness by displaying a piece of cloth on a tree. Levine and Brown tweaked the narrative, turned the cloth into a yellow ribbon, and fashioned it into a three-minute burst of singalong optimism.
But the yellow ribbon wasn’t an invention of the early 1970s, it had roots in American folklore going back goddamn generations. Variations of the motif appear in 19th-century ballads, particularly in Civil War–era songs about women waiting for their loved ones to return from the perpetual shitstorms of war. Later versions in the early 20th century kept the image alive, so when Levine and Brown reached for a symbol of waiting and forgiveness, it already carried deep cultural resonance.
Sweet as the sentiment was, Ringo Starr quickly passed on the song when it was offered to him, and Tony Orlando nearly followed suit. He thought the song sounded a little too corny, which is saying a lot when you consider that his previous big hit was the silly ‘Knock Three Times’, but the producers eventually convinced Orlando that the story and hook were irresistible. He cut the track with his group Dawn in 1972, and when it was released the following year, it struck a fucking chord around the world. The single sold millions of copies, topped the US Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks, and reached number one in the UK, Australia, and about a dozen other countries.
While Andy Kaufman’s abrasive Tony Clifton performance, deliberately off-key and dripping with contempt, was indicative of how bored a significant portion of the fucking country had become with the oft-played song after a few years, no satirical take was strong enough to undercut its bizarre power. As silly or saccharine as it may have seemed, ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ had already escaped the realm of radio pop and entered the global lexicon of symbols, ensuring that a simple story-song about doubt and redemption would go down as one of the most culturally consequential hits of the 1970s.
