On a day set aside for honoring those who served, Tony Orlando will join hosts Wendy Stuart and Tym Moss for a special Veterans Day guest appearance on If These Walls Could Talk, broadcast live on Wednesday, November 11, 2026, at 2:00 PM ET. For more than half a century, few artists have stood as close to America’s veterans as Orlando, and few songs have carried a message home as faithfully as the one he first sang in 1973.
That song, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree,” was the work of songwriters Irwin Levine and L. Russell “Larry” Brown. Levine wrote the words and Brown wrote the melody, and the pair had already given Tony Orlando and Dawn hits including “Knock Three Times.” Brown has traced the song’s beginnings to an old folk tale of a Union soldier, held in a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in Georgia, who wrote ahead to the woman he loved as he prepared to come home. In the story he had read, the signal was a handkerchief tied around a tree. Brown later explained that a handkerchief did not feel romantic enough, so he and Levine made it a yellow ribbon. It was a small change, and it gave the country a symbol it has never let go of.
Orlando and Dawn first performed the song on New Year’s Day 1973 before some 70,000 people at the Cotton Bowl, and on April 21 of that year it reached the top of the U.S. pop charts. In the years that followed, the yellow ribbon left the record and entered American life, tied to porches, mailboxes and old oak trees as a quiet sign that a family was waiting for someone in uniform to come home safely. Larry Brown’s melody became the sound of that waiting, and of every homecoming that answered it.
Orlando has spent decades giving that gift back to the men and women it came to represent. In 1993 he launched the Yellow Ribbon Salute to Veterans in Branson, Missouri, a Veterans Day tradition that grew until, by his account, some 178,000 veterans came to Branson for the November 11 weekend, a gathering he has called the largest of its kind in America. The salute became home to the Yellow Ribbon Medal of Freedom, presented each year in honor of service. Looking back on the first time he sang the song, Orlando told The American Legion Magazine, “Little did I know how much of a life-changing experience it would be.”
Wendy Stuart and Tym Moss, who co-host If These Walls Could Talk each week, have built the program on conversation that gives a guest’s story room to breathe. Their Veterans Day broadcast offers Orlando a chance to speak about the song, about the songwriters who placed it in his hands, and about the veterans and military families who made it their own, including the families who are still waiting for someone who did not come home.
For viewers, the appearance is an invitation to pause on November 11: to remember those who served, to honor those who never returned, and to thank the families who kept the porch light on. Tony Orlando appears live on If These Walls Could Talk with Wendy Stuart and Tym Moss on Wednesday, November 11, 2026, at 2:00 PM ET.
About Tony Orlando
Tony Orlando is a New York–born singer and entertainer whose recordings with Dawn include “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree,” “Knock Three Times” and “Candida,” and who starred with Dawn in the CBS variety series Tony Orlando and Dawn. In 1993 he founded the Yellow Ribbon Salute to Veterans in Branson, Missouri, and he has remained one of the entertainment world’s most devoted champions of America’s veterans and military families. He is a recipient of the Josie Music Awards Icon Award.
Watch Tony Orlando on If These Walls Could Talk with hosts Wendy Stuart and Tym Moss on Wednesday November 11th, 2026 at 2 PM ET here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1gd4T5AwpE