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Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

by Jo Ambros

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Martin Kaluza writes:

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
Pete Seeger

Around 1950, the American folk singer Pete Seeger came across a Ukrainian folk song in Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel And Quiet Flows the Don. The story takes place at the time of the October Revolution. In one passage Don Cossacks ride off to join the Czar’s army. They sing: “Where are the flowers? The girls have plucked them. Where are the girls? They’ve all taken husbands. Where are the men? They’re all in the army. Gallop, gallop, gallop, wheee!”
Seeger wrote the lines in his notebook. Five years later, while dozing on an airplane, he got an inspiration: He felt the words “long time passing” definitely sang well, so he put them together with the lines he had noted years earlier and added what he called the intellectual’s perennial complaint, “When will we ever learn?”
Seeger published the song in Sing Out! magazine in 1955. “I thought I wrote the melody until about a year later when a friend wrote me and pointed out that it was similar to a lumberjack tune I had recorded from the Adirondacks.” An Irish song: “Johnson says he'll unload more hay / Says he'll unload ten times a day.”
Then in 1960, Seeger’s folk singer friend Joe Hickerson added two verses, and with them the lyrics finally came full circle: “Where have all the soldiers gone? Gone to graveyards, every one” and “Where have all the graveyards gone? Covered with flowers, every one.”
“Where Have All the Flowers Gone” appeared in the midst of the Cold War, at the height of the nuclear arms race. Radio and television played a minor role in its growing popularity, as Pete Seeger had been boycotted by American broadcasting until far into the 1970s. One exception was a television performance in 1967 on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (one of the brothers can later be heard on the original recording of “Give Peace a Chance”). Seeger used the chance to present a song protesting the Vietnam War, which consequently brought him additional years of a TV boycott. The success of his song asking about the flowers was nevertheless unstoppable.
Joan Baez recorded a version. And Peter, Paul & Mary’s recording was also a hit. “The Kingston Trio sang the song as well, and Marlene Dietrich adopted it from them,” said Seeger in an interview with the East German newspaper Neues Deutschland. “Max Colpet made a German version that sings better than my English one. In German it really sounds more impressive: ‘Sag mir wo die Blumen sind’” (Tell me where the flowers are).

credits

released April 14, 2022
Jo Ambros - Guitar
Dieter Fischer - Bass
Johann Polzer - Drums

Arrangement by Ambros/Fischer/Polzer

Recorded by Johann Polzer at WRS3, August 2 & 6, 2021
Mixed and mastered by Joe Joaquin
Liner Notes by Martin Kaluza
English Translation by Allison Brown
Artwork by Gérard Krimmel
Produced by Jo Ambros © 2022
hinterland records 008

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