<P> "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" is a modern folk - style song . The melody and the first three verses were written by Pete Seeger in 1955 and published in Sing Out! magazine . Additional verses were added in May 1960 by Joe Hickerson, who turned it into a circular song . Its rhetorical "where?" and meditation on death place the song in the ubi sunt tradition . In 2010, the New Statesman listed it as one of the "Top 20 Political Songs". </P> <P> The 1964 release of the song as a Columbia Records 45 single, 13 - 33088, by Pete Seeger was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2002 in the Folk category . </P> <P> Seeger found inspiration for the song in October 1955 while he was on a plane bound for a concert at Oberlin College, one of the few venues which would hire him during the McCarthy era . Leafing through his notebook he saw the passage, "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 were taken from the traditional Cossack folk song "Koloda - Duda", referenced in the Mikhail Sholokhov novel And Quiet Flows the Don (1934), which Seeger had read "at least a year or two before". </P> <P> Seeger created a song which was subsequently published in Sing Out in 1962 . He recorded a version with three verses on The Rainbow Quest album (Folkways LP FA 2454) released in July 1960 . Later, Joe Hickerson added two more verses with a recapitulation of the first in May 1960 in Bloomington, Indiana . </P>

Originally written by pete seeger on a flight to oberlin
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