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Tie A Yellow Ribbon 'Round The Ole Oak Tree' was a popular song by Dawn featuring Tony Orlando.

Written by Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown and produced by Hank Medress and David Appell, "Tie A Yellow Ribbon Around The Ole Oak Tree" was a massive worldwide hit in 1973 for Dawn featuring Tony Orlando.

It reached number one on both the UK and US charts for four weeks in April 1973.

The song enjoyed duplicate success on country radio, as a cover version by Johnny Carver. Carver's rendition - recorded simply "Yellow Ribbon" - was a top 10 on the Billboard magazine Hot Country Singles chart in June 1973.

The song had a fresh wave of popularity in 1981, in the wake of the Iranian hostage crisis. [1]

The origin of the idea of a yellow ribbon may have come from the 19th Century pratice 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 official color of the cavalry is yellow (worn on insignia, etc.), and the song "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," which later inspired the John Wayne movie of the same name, is a reference to this.

The symbol of a yellow ribbon became widely known in civilian life in the 1970s as a reminder of an absent loved one, either in the military or in jail that they would be welcomed home on their return.

From the Library of Congress:

In October of 1971, newspaper columnist Pete Hamill wrote a piece for the New York Post called "Going Home." In it, 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. Hamill claimed to have heard this story in oral tradition.

In June of 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.

One factor that may have influenced Hamill's decision to do so was that, 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. Hammill 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. [1]

In 2006, a widely circulated viral video featured the Asylum Street Spankers doing a satirical parody of the song, "Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV," which mocked the popular yellow ribbon car magnets intended to show support for American soldiers in the Iraq War.

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