I heard Pete Seeger (1919–2014) give a concert when I was twelve or so, in the auditorium of my grammar school, almost the only concert I can remember at which it felt utterly, irresistibly natural and joyous to sing along. Seeger had that effect on a good many people; he was perhaps the greatest American song leader of the two American centuries he lived in.
He grew up in an intensely musical family; his father Charles was a distinguished musicologist, his mother Constance de Clyver a concert violinist and Juilliard violin teacher. Also in the Seeger family atmosphere was the intertwining of music and politics; his father was forced to resign from the music department at Berkeley in 1918 because of his pacifism. Charles and Constance divorced when Seeger was seven and Charles married Ruth Crawford, who would become one of the most important American composers of the twentieth century; all four of Charles and Ruth’s children became folksingers.
Seeger gravitated as a boy to the ukulele, then heard the banjo for the first time in 1936 while traveling with Charles and Ruth in North Carolina. He enrolled in Harvard but dropped out in 1938, and without quite intending it was increasingly drawn into the world of folk music and left-wing politics. He joined the Young Communist League as a teenager and then the Communist Party itself from 1942 to 1949. A job with Alan Lomax gave him access to authentic folk music; working with Woody Guthrie showed him how music can change hearts and minds. Following the party line, his lyrics during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact opposed the draft and American rearmament; after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, he sang prowar songs like “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave” and “Dear Mr. President.” He enlisted in the Army and served in the Pacific, mostly, as he said, “strumming his banjo” for the troops.
Seeger wrote the first three verses of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” in 1955, on his way to a concert at Oberlin College, one of the few organizations willing to hire him during the McCarthy era, looking at some notes he had taken on a Cossack folk song. Later the folksinger Joe Hickerson (b. 1935), longtime director of the Archive of Folk Song for the Library of Congress, added the fourth and fifth verses and, by a wonderful inspiration, a repetition of the first verse as the final verse. Like Ed McCurdy’s “Strangest Dream,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” has been recorded by numerous artists and translated into many languages; like “Strangest Dream,” its antiwar force is indirect, hinted at only in the relation between the orderly account of flowers, young women, young men, young soldiers, new graves, and the recurring question “When will they”—and in the last verse “When will we”—“ever learn?”
Seeger lived a long life, was the most beloved American folksinger of his time, attended to an astonishing variety of causes and repertories, opposed the arms race and the Vietnam War and the pollution of the Hudson River, supported Solidarity, and kept singing and holding to his socialist principles right till the end. (In 2011 he marched with Occupy Wall Street; in 2012 he sang at a concert for Leonard Peltier.) When he died in 2014, President Obama aptly noted that he had been called “America’s tuning fork.”
Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the flowers gone?
Girls have picked them, every one!
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the young girls gone, long time passing?
Where have all the young girls gone, long time ago?
Where have all the young girls gone?
Taken husbands, every one!
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the young men gone, long time passing?
Where have all the young men gone, long time ago?
Where have all the young men gone?
Gone for soldiers, every one!
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the soldiers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the soldiers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards, every one!
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the graveyards gone, long time passing?
Where have all the graveyards gone, long time ago?
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Covered with flowers, every one!
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?