Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

Composition

In October 1955, Pete Seeger was flying to a show at Oberlin College—one of the few places that would book him during the McCarthy era—when he came across a passage in his notebook. It read: "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."

These lines came from a traditional Cossack folk song called "Koloda-Duda," which Seeger had encountered in Mikhail Sholokhov's novel And Quiet Flows the Don a year or two earlier. For the melody, Seeger borrowed from an Irish lumberjack song with the line "Johnson says he'll load more hay," slowing it down to fit his new lyrics.

He recorded a three-verse version for The Rainbow Quest album, released in July 1960. Then, in May 1960, a graduate student named Joe Hickerson—who was about to become folk-music director at Camp Woodland in the Catskills—added two more verses and brought back the first one, turning the song into a circular piece. Seeger published the finished song in Sing Out! in 1962, with the copyright credited to him and Hickerson.

Versions

The Kingston Trio first recorded "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" in 1961. Thinking it was a traditional folk song, they initially listed themselves as its writers. After being contacted by Pete Seeger, they removed their names and credited Seeger and Joe Hickerson instead.

Seeger later acknowledged the trio's success with the song. That same year, the group The Landsmen put out a 45 rpm single of it on the Arvee label. In 1962, Peter, Paul and Mary included the track on their self-titled debut album, which spent five weeks as the number-one album in the United States.

Marlene Dietrich performed the song in three languages. She first sang it in French as "Où vont les fleurs," with lyrics by Francis Lemarque and Robert Rouzaud, at a 1962 UNICEF concert; this version appeared on the EP "Marlène" in July 1962. Her German rendition, "Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind," was translated by Max Colpet. Dietrich performed it during a tour of Israel, where she received a warm welcome.

She was the first performer to break the taboo of publicly using German in Israel after the Second World War. The German single was released in Germany in September 1962. In August 1963, the UK music weekly Record Mirror gave it a highly favorable review, praising Dietrich's "curious, staccato style" while noting she still drew "the maximum warmth and emotion" from the song. Her English-language version came out as a 7" single in the US in March 1964, and in the UK on the EP "Marlene Dietrich Returns To Germany."

Also in 1962, Italian-French singer Dalida recorded the song in French as "Que sont devenues les fleurs?", adapted by Guy Béart. The Folkswingers cut an instrumental version for their 1963 album "12 String Guitar! Vol. 2." That same year, Jaap Fischer released a Dutch version, "Zeg me waar de bloemen zijn," as the B-side of his single "Jan Soldaat." Another Dutch rendition, "Waar zijn al die bloemen toch?", came from Conny van den Bos in 1963. The Searchers put their version on the album "Meet the Searchers," released in June 1963.

The Springfields, featuring Dusty Springfield, issued a German-language version in 1963. Bobby Darin recorded the song for his album "Golden Folk Hits," released in November 1963. Eddy Arnold and The Needmore Creek Singers recorded it on October 9, 1963, and it appeared on their album "Folk Song Book" in January 1964.

Did You Know?

• Pete Seeger's recording of the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2002 in the Folk category with the release year given as 1964 as a Columbia Records single.
• In June 2026, CBS News included the song in its list of the 250 essential American songs of the past 250 years.
• The 1962 recording of the song appeared on the compilation album Pete Seeger's Greatest Hits (1967) released by Columbia Records as CS 9416.