Pete Seeger wrote “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” in 1955. According to the account usually given, he was on a flight to a concert at Oberlin College in October of that year when he came across, in his notebook, lines he had taken from the Cossack folk song “Koloda-Duda,” which is mentioned in Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel And Quiet Flows the Don. Seeger said in a 2013 interview that the melody came from an Irish lumberjack song, which he slowed down. He published the first three verses in Sing Out! magazine and recorded a three-verse version for the Folkways album The Rainbow Quest, released in July 1960.
Joe Hickerson, then a graduate student who became folk-music director at Camp Woodland in the Catskills that summer, added two more verses in May 1960 in Bloomington, Indiana, repeating the opening to close the circle. The lyric follows a chain: the flowers were picked by young girls, the girls went to young men, the young men went off as soldiers, the soldiers are in graveyards, and the graveyards have turned to flowers. Each verse ends by asking when anyone will learn.
The Kingston Trio released the song as a Capitol single in December 1961. Peter, Paul and Mary included it on their 1962 debut album, which spent five weeks at number one in the United States, and Marlene Dietrich sang it in French, German and English in the early 1960s. Johnny Rivers took it to No. 26 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1965. Seeger’s recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2002.
Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs recorded it on 18 October 1967 at Columbia Studio A in Nashville, and it appeared on their album Changin’ Times (Columbia, released 6 January 1968). Flatt sang lead, with Jake Tullock singing tenor, Scruggs on banjo, Randy Scruggs on guitar, Buck Graves on dobro, Tullock on bass and Charlie McCoy on harmonica.
