Now I've got to know what was that bus-dude's crime

November 1, 2009 11:18 AM

Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree is pretty unusual, in that its a romantic song about a recently released convict. It seems to be based on an urban legend, or possibly true story (see the wikipedia link). So my question is: Can we work out what the dude was in prison for?

Clues:
-He was in prison for 3 years.
-Some of the stories the song is based on take place in Georgia

Given that there was a court case about the origins of the story, perhaps the information is documented somewhere.

posted by memebake to law & government (26 comments total)

So what you're asking is, what crimes would land someone in prison for 3 years? It depends on whether there was a single crime, multiple ones, time off for good behavior, etc. I think it would be a long list - a bit like asking "how many ways can you make $10 out of coins and bills."
posted by zippy at 11:33 AM on November 1

In the song, he sings, "I'm coming home, I've done my time; I've got to know what is and isn't mine." From that, i always assumed he was in jail for robbery.
posted by not that girl at 11:35 AM on November 1

Well, a good place to start would be Cecil Adams' column on the subject. Pete Hamill's original column on the story (the one that occasioned the lawsuit) doesn't give the crime, though it does say the dude was in jail in New York.
posted by Johnny Assay at 11:35 AM on November 1

I always assumed that he had been in the military and was hoping his gal had waited for him. Ew, now I'm creeped out thinking he was in the clink.
posted by dzaz at 11:36 AM on November 1 [1 favorite has favorites]

"I'm coming home, I've done my time; I've got to know what is and isn't mine."

I always assumed it was a 3-year stint in the military, and "I've got to know what is and isn't mine" refers to finding out whether the girl waited for him.
posted by scody at 11:42 AM on November 1

Guys, "prison" is right there in the song:
"Bus driver, please look for me
'Cause I couldn't bear to see what I might see
I'm really still in prison, and my love she holds the key
A simple yellow ribbon's what I need to set me free
I wrote and told her please:
Tie a yellow ribbon 'round the old oak tree (etc.)"
posted by Floydd at 11:51 AM on November 1

Guys, "prison" is right there in the song:
[...]
I'm really still in prison, and my love she holds the key
[...]

You don't see how that could maybe be a metaphor? I'm not necessarily saying it is, just playing devil's advocate.
posted by axiom at 11:57 AM on November 1

I think this is probably impossible to answer. First off, it's a folk story so there is no way to find out what state it was. The earliest version mentioned in this article is from Chino Penitentiary in the 1950s, which would make it California, but I'm sure there was another earlier version nobody's found yet.

And as Zippy says it could be any number of crimes for which the punishment was 3 to 5 years, or longer with time off for good behavior or released early on parole.
posted by interplanetjanet at 12:01 PM on November 1

Johnny Assay: thanks for the Cecil Adams link. That led me to this comment by someone:

The first widespread "yellow ribbon fever" was not in 1981 but rather 1973, when the POWs were released from Vietnam. I distinctly remember newsreels of wives, daughters, and sweethearts wearing or displaying this emblem when greeting their loved ones. In fact, I believe the song's massive popularity at the time was due to popular belief that the "prison" mentioned in the lyrics was the Hanoi Hilton.

If this is accurate, then it could be that the lyrics are supposed to imply he is returning from being a prisoner of war. Can anyone else shed any light on this?
posted by memebake at 12:09 PM on November 1 [1 favorite has favorites]

On the other hand, if the song is just ripped off from Pete Hamill's story (which seems likely, even though when Pete Hamill tried to sue he didn't win) then he's not a POW.
posted by memebake at 12:30 PM on November 1

And just to give you and idea here is the California Penal Code from 1915, unfortunately the later versions aren't available in full from Google Books.

Crimes with a possibility of 3 to 5 years jail time include manslaughter, kidnapping, robbery, assault, rape, bigamy, unlawful removal of bodies from graves, willfully allowing a steam boiler to explode and kill someone, and any number of other crimes.

I think an exploding steam boiler would liven up the story.
posted by interplanetjanet at 12:33 PM on November 1 [2 favorites has favorites]

Although the unlawful removal of bodies from graves would give "got to know what is and isn't mine" a new flavor...
posted by biddeford at 12:41 PM on November 1 [1 favorite has favorites]

Guys, "prison" is right there in the song:
[...]
I'm really still in prison, and my love she holds the key
[...]

You don't see how that could maybe be a metaphor? I'm not necessarily saying it is, just playing devil's advocate.

Yeah, I always thought it was a metaphor.

Who'd write a creepy song about an ex-con?
posted by dzaz at 12:49 PM on November 1

Who'd write a creepy song about an ex-con?

Well, to play devil's advocate on side of it being a guy getting out of prison (even though I'm in the "he was a soldier" camp): the song was written at the time of a growing prisoners' rights movement, which itself grew out of other mass movements at the time (antiwar, black power, women's liberation, gay liberation, etc.). The Attica prison uprising -- which had a broad social, political, and cultural impact -- had taken place only two years before the song was written. So it's not necessarily true that a song about an ex-con would have automatically be seen as "creepy" in the context of the early 1970s.
posted by scody at 1:20 PM on November 1

FWIW, Tony Orlando says that the song was written "about a guy coming home from serving a prison term on a bad check charge, and his concerns about being welcomed by his wife."
posted by Knappster at 1:25 PM on November 1 [3 favorites has favorites]

Oh, and going back to the question of why a pop song would be about a criminal: interestingly enough, the song that immediately preceded "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" at the top of the Billboard charts was Vicki Lawrence's murder ballad, "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia." Maybe just a coincidence, but it does point a little to the fact that there was perhaps a range of topics for mainstream pop songs in the early '70s that's different from what we hear today.
posted by scody at 1:28 PM on November 1

Also, I always assumed that his iffiness about whether his girl would take him back was because not every girl wants to welcome home her ex-con ex-boyfriend.
posted by OolooKitty at 1:31 PM on November 1

I think we are working on a false assumption. Read the Straight Dope link again. There is no guy. It was a story. The songwriters got the idea from an urban legend he heard while in the Army and from a 1949 song, which was a rewrite of a 1917 song, which itself was a retelling of an 1838 minstrel show.

The American Folklife Center has found an old folktale from a 1959 book about prison reform. But it is marked as a tale, not a true history. The story is about "a convict returning from five years' imprisonment in a distant prison, but his people were too poor to visit him and were too uneducated to be very articulate on paper. Hence he had written to them to make a sign for him when he was released and came home. If they wanted him, they should put a white ribbon in the big apple tree which stood close to the railroad track at the bottom of the garden, and he would get off the train, but if they did not want him, they were to do nothing and he would stay on the train and seek a new life elsewhere."

But, if you want to associate a crime with the story, I recommend Jeb and Gail Magruder. He was in jail for less than a year, for a Watergate crime.
posted by Houstonian at 1:54 PM on November 1 [1 favorite has favorites]

I *was* a "he was in the military" guy, but after reading these lyrics, I must conclude that the song was written about a guy in prison:

Bus driver, please look for me
'Cause I couldn't bear to see what I might see
I'm really still in prison, and my love she holds the key

At this point in the story, he is telling the bus driver his story. Either actually on the bus, or imagining what he'll say to the driver once he's actually on the bus. And he asks the bus driver to look for the ribbon. Because he can't bear to look for himself. And he goes on to say that he feels like he is still in prison, because his love hasn't yet told him whether she waited faithfully for him to get out or not. So he feels like he is *still in prison* until he knows her answer.

If he was not in prison, he couldn't feel like he was still there.
posted by gjc at 2:37 PM on November 1

If this is accurate, then it could be that the lyrics are supposed to imply he is returning from being a prisoner of war. Can anyone else shed any light on this?

memebake, why would a POW refer to his years in the enemy's prison as having "done my time"?
posted by IAmBroom at 3:11 PM on November 1

gjc is right, the word "still" means that the prison thing can't be a metaphor.
posted by memebake at 3:16 PM on November 1

IAmBroom: I was thinking about that ... "done my time" could apply to his period of service in the Army, and the prison bit could refer to a prison camp. But it's really stretching it.

Knappster's comment about Tony Orlando seems like the most conclusive answer so far, but I can't find a direct quote on the net.
posted by memebake at 3:23 PM on November 1

Who'd write a creepy song about an ex-con?

Johnny Cash?
posted by kirkaracha at 5:42 PM on November 1 [4 favorites has favorites]

It's not easy to tell what the speaker of the song was in prison for, but it's clear enough that that speaker was in prison, rather than in the military.

But this fact doesn't make the song creepy--rather, it makes the song worth listening to. It's a song not merely saying, "I've been gone for a while, do you want to get back together?" But one that's asking for forgiveness and maybe a little redemption.

And it's absolutely right to put the song in the context of the Johnny Cash and the 70's--a time that was better than ours, in some ways, in its willingness to spring for job training, prison libraries, and to take an interest in the possibility of rehabilitation. It's a radical thing to recognize as human, or even love, somebody who's been incarcerated, and I have to say that people today seem to have a harder time making that kind of leap.

It's also interesting that so many people have linked this song to military service, and I think there's something to that, too. Because even if the song's contemporary fans haven't paid careful attention to the lyrics, there's a sense of guilt and shame that pervades this song that might be more appropriate to military service that many American who buy ribbon magnets and such might wish to openly proclaim.

Those with friends and family in military service are almost always proud of that service, of course. But those yellow ribbons, hearkening back to that song about a criminal, also register another truth: that war is always a crime and in some sense shameful. And the returning soldier wants and needs--and is in fact right to desire--a kind of forgiveness as a part of the process of returning to civilian life.

This is a complexity that isn't always obvious in return celebrations, but that Tony Orlando's song about sympathy for a criminal registers in a subtle and very human way.
posted by washburn at 8:37 PM on November 1 [1 favorite has favorites]

Levine attributed the song's origin to a Civil War story he heard.

The POWs-welcomed-home story is IMO bogus retconning -- although Orlando at least once performed the song at a Bob Hope welcoming event, and credits Hope with making the connection. I remember (*sigh*) when the Iran hostage crisis sparked the yellow ribbon craze, and there was discussion then about whether it was appropriate given that the song was about an ex-con. But yes, in the 1970s, there was actually somewhat less moralizing about crime -- e.g. ex-con Jim Rockford -- and there were plenty of country songs about doing time (some of them sung by Cash). It was a little unusual to be in a pop song, but this was still the era of AM radio and the stations that played every type of hit, rather than the specialization by genre and demographic that occurred later.

Oh, also, in the 1970s it was common for columnists to pad space with FOAF-tales of this ilk (Herb Caen was notorious for it).

Interestingly, the Pete Hamill version is the basis of a 2008 film with William Hurt as well as a 1977 Japanese film, both called The Yellow Handkerchief.

Anyway, I suppose we could narrow down the possible charges to a few that are more socially acceptable gaffes, such as the check forgery angle, or even a self-defense murder of some kind. Probably the worst would be armed robbery, though. I can't imagine anyone getting sentimental about anyone who'd done worse and that's bad enough. But more to the point, this is a classic Macguffin. It's not important to the narrative that it be explained -- and in fact, explaining it might ruin the dramatic tension by inspiring just that moralizing or ethical weighting I was mentioning. The listener not knowing the crime will supply one that fits their own experience and moral universe. It's really a brilliant device for a story-song and was probably responsible for it becoming such a massive hit to begin with.
posted by dhartung at 8:51 PM on November 1

I like to believe the singer was, in the song's universe, the notorious Yellow Ribbon Strangler, who left a trademark bow tied around the necks of all his victims. The song is a threat to his girl: You better not have snitched while I was away.
posted by ROTFL at 9:55 AM on November 2