THE 1000 BEST SONGS IN THE WORLD EVER.
159-Pete Seeger-Where Have All The Flowers Gone?
1955-Has never charted in the UK.
Best Bit-At 3.43.Seeger’s lyrics show how war can be cyclical,girls pick flowers,men pick girls,men go to war and fill graves with their dead,which girls cover with flowers.
Peter Seeger(May 3,1919-January 27,2014) was an American Folk singer and social activist.As a member of the Folk group the Weavers he spent 13 weeks at Number 1 on Billboard in 1950 with the Lead Belly song Goodnight Irene.As a songwriter two of his notable songs were ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’,a Billboard Number 1 for the Byrds and ‘If I Had A Hammer’ made famous by Trini Lopez.
Seeger wrote this song as a call for peace,he was inspired by Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel ‘And Quiet Flows the Don.’It describes Cossack soldiers going off to war and singing ‘Where are the flowers,the girls have plucked them,where are the girls,they’ve all taken husbands.’The words resonated with Seeger and about two years later he thought of the line ‘long time passing’ and pieced the song together.
‘When will they ever learn,oh when will they ever learn.’
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