Turn! Turn! Turn!

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Turn! Turn! Turn!
Written by Pete Seeger, 1959

This gentle, thoughtful song began with a bit of grumbling. In the late 1950s, Pete Seeger’s music publisher asked him for a break from protest songs. Couldn’t he write something with broad appeal, the publisher wondered, something like “Goodnight, Irene,” the Lead Belly song that Seeger’s old group, the Weavers, had turned into a big hit? Seeger was irritated. He told his publisher that he had better find himself another songwriter, because protest songs were the only kind he knew how to write.

Then he opened his notebook. A year or so earlier, he had copied down some lines from the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, a book of ancient wisdom in the Hebrew Bible that has long been treasured for its reflections on life’s seasons. Seeger set the lines to a melody he made up, rearranged a few, left some out, and repeated the opening lines as a chorus. He added just one word of his own, “turn,” sung three times. He also wrote the song’s closing plea for peace: “I swear it’s not too late.” Apart from those few words, the lyrics are thousands of years old. When the publisher heard the demo, he was delighted. It was exactly what he had hoped for. Most accounts date the song to 1959, though late in life Seeger remembered writing it a few years earlier. Years afterward, he said he hadn’t realized at the time that these few words would become some of the most important he ever latched on to.

Seeger himself wasn’t the first to release it. In 1962, the folk trio the Limeliters put it on an album under the title “To Everything There Is a Season,” a few months before Seeger’s own recording came out. Seeger’s version was recorded live that July at the Bitter End, a coffeehouse in Greenwich Village. One of the Limeliters’ backing musicians was a young guitarist named Jim McGuinn, who later became known as Roger. He loved the song. In 1963 he arranged it for Judy Collins’s third album and played guitar on her recording. Her clear, graceful version, the one in the video above, helped carry the song beyond the coffeehouse crowd.

The song’s biggest moment came almost by accident. In the summer of 1965, McGuinn was touring the Midwest with his new band, the Byrds, when his future wife, Dolores, asked him to play it on the tour bus. It came out sounding less like a folk song and more like the shimmering folk rock the Byrds were known for. McGuinn brought it into the studio, and the Byrds’ recording reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on December 4, 1965, staying there for three weeks. With the Vietnam War escalating and the country divided, the song’s call for peace struck a deep chord. Seeger liked the Byrds’ record and said their chiming guitars sounded like bells. It was the Byrds’ last number one hit, and in 2001 their recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

More than sixty years later, the song still speaks to people of every background. It reminds us that life moves in seasons, that hard times pass, and that there is a time for every purpose under heaven.