Peter, Paul, and Mary are back in the news. Just days before the 17th anniversary of Mary Travers’ death, a new YouTube channel dedicated to the legendary folk trio launched on Sept. 4, bringing the band’s iconic music back into the fold and introducing the trio to an entirely new generation.
Following a battle with leukemia, Travers died on Sept. 16, 2009. She was 72. Later, in January 2025, Peter Yarrow, the group’s other founding member, died at 86. Today, Paul Stookey, now 88, is the trio’s sole surviving member, but despite two-thirds of the group leaving the world, the music of Peter, Paul and Mary has hardly disappeared.
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Among their most recognizable recordings is a 1963 hit that has been interpreted in ways its creators never intended for more than six decades. It’s also the most recent song uploaded to their YouTube channel, complete with a new lyric video.
That song is, of course, “Puff the Magic Dragon.”
A chart-climbing hit that peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, the track contains lyrics that listeners have interpreted for decades as references to marijuana. Despite Yarrow and lyricist Leonard Lipton repeatedly rejecting that interpretation, some fans still believe the song’s “puff,” “dragon,” “Jackie paper,” and “autumn mist” are coded drug slang.
In reality, the song is about something much more innocent. According to Yarrow, Lipton wrote the original poem as a teenager in 1959, with Yarrow later setting it to music. Yarrow and Stookey maintained that the track is purely about the loss of childhood, imagination, and the pains of growing up.
“It was not intended to be a lyric of a song or anything; it was just something that he typed on paper, and I looked at it and loved it,” Yarrow said. “I wrote the rest of the words to give it a song form and a dramatic arc, and the music to it.”
Rumors that the song was secretly about marijuana began circulating soon after its release, including in a 1964 Newsweek article about supposed hidden drug messages in popular music. Years later, in 1970, Vice President Spiro Agnew added “Puff, the Magic Dragon” to his list of songs he considered part of the drug culture.
“It was spurious news reporting,” Stookey said. “The first time I heard of it was a Newsweek article that said, ‘It is reported that …,’ which, of course, is impossible to defend against. Because it was untrue and an interpretive concept, you can make anything out of anything if you want to.”
Released in January 1963, “Puff, the Magic Dragon” featured on the group’s second studio album, Moving, which climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard 200. The song was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Recording for Children in 1964. The group had already won two Grammys for their debut album in 1963 and would eventually win five Grammys total.
As today marks the first anniversary of Travers’ death since Yarrow’s passing, the new YouTube channel offers another way for Peter, Paul and Mary’s music to reach listeners who weren’t around when the trio first made it famous.
Related: 1966 Signature Song, Written in 10 Minutes, Launched a Country Queen to No. 1
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