We've been talking about the Brothers Four in another thread, and it reminded me of my favorite Brothers Four song, "Yellow Bird." This is what I hear on their Columbia The Brothers Four album. There are a few words I'm not sure of, so I'd appreciate comments. I gather from various sources that the tune was adapted by Norman Luboff, not an original composition.
-Joe Offer-


YELLOW BIRD
lyrics by Marilyn Keith and Alan Bergman
Music by Norman Luboff, 1958

Yellow bird, up high in banana tree.
Yellow bird, you sit all alone like me.
Did your lady friend leave the nest again?
That is very sad, Makes me feel so bad.
You can fly away, In the sky away,
You're more lucky than me.

I also had a pretty girl,
She's not with me today.
They're all the same, the pretty girls,
Take tenderness, then they fly away.

Yellow bird, up high in banana tree.
Yellow bird, you sit all alone like me.
Let her fly away, in the sky away,
Pick a town and soon, take from night to noon.
Black and yellow you, like banana too,
They might pick you some day.

Wish that I were a yellow bird
I'd fly away with you.
But I am not a yellow bird
So here I sit, nothing else to do.
Yellow bird, Yellow bird, Yellow bird.

Good old John in Brisbane supplied the tune:

Click to play

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Note this:

Though not actually a calypso, one of the most popular songs to come out of the 1956-57 American calypso craze was "Yellow Bird." Its melody was derived from a nineteenth-century Haitian song called "Choucoune." During the 1950s, vocal director Norman Luboff adapted the melody and songwriters Alan and Marilyn Keith Bergman wrote new lyrics for the song."Yellow Bird" was featured on the Norman Luboff Choir's Calypso Holiday album (1957), with liner notes describing it as a "serenade of a lonesome lover to an equally lonesome bird." It quickly became an easy listening standard throughout the United States, recorded on dozens of singles and as the title cut to albums by the Mills Brothers, Roger Williams and Lawrence Welk.

source: http://www.calypsoworld.org/noflash/songs-12.htm