It’s funny how you can hear a song your whole life and never really pay attention to the words.
Example: I was discussing the song Tie a Yellow Ribbon (‘Round the Old Oak Tree) the other day with my nine-year-old daughter, and she pointed out to me that the song is about a jailbird.
This was news to me. I had never actually paid much attention to the lyrics. I thought it was a song popularized in the early ‘70s by Tony Orlando & Dawn to commemorate the thousands of US soldiers returning home from their long service in the Vietnam War.
But of course, in the Philippines, the song has a whole other connotation. It signifies People Power, and popular opposition to the Marcos regime. By some accounts, thousands of Ninoy followers tied yellow ribbons around trees and other vertical surfaces here in a show of support when the opposition leader returned to his country in 1983. In any case, it was Cory’s color, and it became Cory’s song after Ninoy was killed — a day observed as a non-working Filipino holiday this Tuesday, Aug. 21.
My daughter Isobel was humming the tune one evening, along with some of the words, and we got to talking about its meaning.
“So, this guy’s coming home from Vietnam,” I said, “and he wants to know if his girlfriend—”
“But the song says ‘I’m coming home, I’ve done my time.’” (Obviously, Isobel knows her way around YouTube and song lyric sites. She’d done her research.) “So I think it means he was in jail. Because then he says, ‘I’ve come to know what is and isn’t mine.’”
“So you’re saying he’s a reformed criminal, and he’s learned not to steal cars or rob banks or whatever?”
“Yes. He learned it’s not right. He learned that in prison.”
“Yeah, but I think it’s a metaphor. Like, he’s ‘done his time,’ served his tour of duty—”
“What’s a ‘tour of duty’?”
“It’s when you have to serve a certain amount of time in the military. So he’s done his time, and he’s taking the bus home, and he wants to see if she still cares for him — to see if she ‘is or isn’t mine.’”
“But it also says ‘I’m really still in prison, and my love she holds the key.’”
“Again, it’s a metaphor,” I tell her. “You know, like he’s ‘imprisoned’ in the trenches of the Mekong or wherever, and the Viet Cong are coming over the hill, and he just keeps thinking about her — just thinking about her, for three long years. He should be thinking about the Viet Cong coming over the hill, but he’s hung up on his girlfriend back home. See?”
Isobel didn’t seem too convinced. “But he says he’s ‘still in prison, in his heart.’” She blinked innocently, perhaps sympathizing with the guy in the song.
I sighed. I tried a different tack. “Look, if he was in prison for three years, how come she never came to visit him? It was ‘three long years,’ right? So why didn’t she ever spend some time with him on Visitors’ Day? It doesn’t add up.”
“Maybe she didn’t have a car.”
“There’s a bus! A bus that goes past her house! The guy in the song is on it! He got on it to get to her house! Are you saying the bus doesn’t travel both ways? Are you saying she couldn’t have caught the bus to visit him in prison?”
Isobel kind of shrugged.
“Maybe she was busy.”
“Busy? I can understand not visiting the guy for three years if he’s out on a battlefield, halfway around the world. But not if he’s in prison. Couldn’t she call? They had telephones back then, you know (even if they didn’t have Facebook and Skype). She could have, I don’t know, written a letter.”
Isobel: Shrug.
Anyway, it turns out that the song’s back story is even more complicated. The idea apparently sprang from a journalist named Pete Hamill, who published a piece called “Going Home” about a prisoner coming home to his Florida girlfriend’s home, where she’d hung a bandana to welcome him back; then the story got picked up by Reader’s Digest and turned into a TV movie starring James Earl Jones. The phrase became very popular, enough so that two songwriters used it as the basis for their big hit, which they claimed they’d heard used in the military years before. The song went on to sell three million copies. (So why was it yellow? Well, there was the popular 1949 movie and song, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, about a US cavalry man’s wife back home.)
Another interesting twist is that Ninoy Aquino was himself imprisoned by Marcos before returning to the Philippines. He was a “soldier” as well, standing with the opposition against Marcos. So for Filipinos, ever meticulous about song lyrics, it’s a toss-up whether it’s a prisoner song or a soldier song.
None of this seemed to faze Isobel. She eventually directed me to a website with the words to Tie a Yellow Ribbon, written by Irvine Levine and L. Russell Brown in 1972. The words, displayed quite clearly in Helvetica font, did seem to confirm Isobel’s interpretation.
Funny how sharp kids’ ears are.
Next week we’ll try to figure out what Mac- Arthur Park is all about.