I played that song in a polka band when I was fifteen, my first paying gig. So Pirate's ruminations (no, you're not the only one who has thoughts like that, but may be fairly rare in posting them on a barefoot running forum) got me wondering. Here's the whole history according to Wikipedia:
"The origin of the idea of a
yellow ribbon as a token of remembrance may have been the 19th century practice that some women allegedly had of wearing a yellow ribbon in their hair to signify their devotion to a husband or sweetheart serving in the U.S. Cavalry. The song "'Round Her Neck She Wears a Yeller Ribbon", which later inspired the
John Wayne movie
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, is a reference to this.
The symbol of a yellow ribbon became widely known in civilian life in the 1970s as a reminder that an absent loved one, either in the military or in jail, would be welcomed home on their return.
The story of a convict who had told his love to tie a ribbon to a tree outside of town is an American folk tale, dating to before 1959.In October 1971, newspaper columnist
Pete Hamill wrote a piece for the
New York Post called "Going Home". In it, he told a variant of the story, in which college students on a bus trip to the beaches of
Fort Lauderdale make friends with an ex-convict who is watching for a yellow handkerchief on a roadside oak in
Brunswick, Georgia. Hamill claimed to have heard this story in oral tradition.
In June 1972, nine months later,
Reader's Digest reprinted "Going Home". Also in June 1972, ABC-TV aired a dramatized version of it in which
James Earl Jones played the role of the returning ex-con. A month and a half after that, Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown registered for copyright a song they called "Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Ole Oak Tree". The authors said they heard the story while serving in the military. Pete Hamill was not convinced and filed suit for infringement.
In May 1973, "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" sold 3 million records in three weeks. When the dust settled,
BMI calculated that radio stations had played it 3 million times – seventeen continuous years of airplay. Hamill dropped his suit after folklorists working for Levine and Brown turned up archival versions of the story that had been collected before "Going Home" had been written."
