Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree (feat. Tony Orlando)

This song was written by Irwin Levine and Larry Brown (credited as L. Russell Brown), who wrote the previous #1 hit for the group, "Knock Three Times." The song is based on a story called "Going Home" that Levine read in the January 1972 edition of the magazine Reader's Digest. The story was originally published in the New York Post on October 14, 1971, appearing in a column called "The Eight Million" written by Pete Hamill. In the story, six kids riding a bus from New York to Fort Lauderdale strike up a conversation with a man named Vingo, who tells them he was just released from prison after four years in jail. He told his wife, Martha, that she could start a new life without him, and for the last three-and-a-half years of his incarceration, he didn't hear from her. In his last letter to her, he gave her instructions. The story reads: We used to live in this town, Brunswick, just before Jacksonville, and there's a big oak tree just as you come into town, a very famous tree, huge. I told her that if she'd take me back, she should put a yellow handkerchief on the tree and I'd get off and come home. If she didn't want me, forget it - no handkerchief and I'd go through. Everyone on the bus kept a lookout for the tree, and when they arrived, there were lots of handkerchiefs tied to it, giving the story a very happy ending. It's a folk story: different versions of it had been floating around for decades, often with White Oak, Georgia as the setting. Pete Hamill heard the story at a Greenwich Village bar called the Lion's Head, where writers would congregate. Levine and Brown thought it would make a great song, so they used the story as the basis for the lyric, changing the handkerchief to a yellow ribbon, since "Tie A Yellow Handkerchief Round The Ole Oak Tree" would be awkward.

There really is a historic oak tree in Brunswick, as told in the New York Post story, but it's in Georgia, nowhere near Fort Lauderdale.

A song of the same name was used in the 1949 John Wayne movie She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. This could be where Levine and Brown got the idea for the yellow ribbon.