How ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’ became the signature song of the 1960s
In October 1965, folk rock group The Byrds dropped their defining hit ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’, often subtitled with ‘(To Everything There is a Season)’. Reaching number one two months later, their Billboard smash single struck a chord with the American youth culture on the cusp of a seismic countercultural shift, offering a lyrical paean to the passage of time’s inevitable change and the turmoil that comes with it, always ticking closer to its end.
It was a sentiment eagerly embraced by a new generation entering a political climate increasingly at odds with their conservative forebears. Cold War tensions had eased, yielding scrutiny of the establishment at home, and the liberal economic conditions of the day afforded young people the chance to ‘drop out’ and live lives outside the confines of traditional mores.
Yet, this liberal freedom was dwarfed by the strife engulfing the nation, from the escalating war in Vietnam and the lingering racial injustices that plagued the country’s conscience even after the Civil Rights Bill was passed.
The Leave It to Beaver, McCarthyite childhood of the 1950s was long gone. The new air that only the kids could sense naturally informed the music that bubbled away in the underground, as well as shot to the top of the Hot 100. Borrowing a little of the Greenwich Village folk revival’s solemnity spiked with The Beatles’ chord changes, The Byrds’ ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’ stood as a signpost of what awaited the pop world. It beckoned a hopeful path away from the straitjacketed expectations of their suburban parents and the eventual dismantling of the edifices of state oppression and political greed.
It didn’t quite work out that way. While upending revolution looked entirely plausible amid 1967’s Summer of Love, the hippy idyll soon curdled into a bad acid trip of draft lotteries, major civil unrest, murders in the Hollywood Hills, and the Altamont disaster, all ending the decade on a deeply sour note.
‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’s’ impact on the pop charts’ pivotal year also owed much to its original author. Written in 1959 by left organiser and folk artist Pete Seeger, a letter from his publisher pushing for another number like his band The Weavers’ take on Lead Belly’s ‘Goodnight Irene’ prompted an irate response from the protest icon. “You better find another songwriter,” Seeger wrote, “This is the only kind of song I know how to write.”
Turning to the ‘good book’ for inspiration, Seeger thumbed through Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 of the Old Testament and lifted the third chapter’s first eight verses virtually word for word to lyrically build the song—adding the “A time of peace / I swear it’s not too late” from his own pen in response to the nuclear threat of the day.
Several artists had covered ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’, from folk trio The Limeliters, Judy Collins and even Marlene Dietrich’s German ‘Glaub, Glaub, Glaub’ cover, but it was The Byrds’ immortal rendition that stands as the song’s defining version. A document of a time in American culture anticipating gigantic change without quite consciously knowing it.
