The Story Behind The Song: Malvina Reynolds and Pete Seeger’s housing crisis satire ‘Little Boxes’
Pete Seeger sang all throughout the 1940s and 1950s, but it was his 1960s output that was perhaps the most significant. During that decade, Seeger’s songs began to explore the notions of civil rights, counterculture, the environment and workers’ rights.
Perhaps his best-loved song is ‘Little Boxes’, recorded and released in 1963. However, Seeger did not actually write the song that satirised the kind of low-cost/poor-quality houses that were being built in the second half of the 20th Century. Rather, it was written by the folk singer-songwriter and political activist Malvina Reynolds.
Nancy Reynolds, Malvina’s daughter, once explained that her mother had written ‘Little Boxes’ after seeing the new low-cost housing developments that were springing up around Daly City in California, which were built after World War II by Henry Doelger. She said: “My mother and father were driving South from San Francisco through Daly City when my mom got the idea for the song. She asked my dad to take the wheel, and she wrote it on the way to the gathering in La Honda where she was going to sing for the Friends Committee on Legislation. When Time magazine wanted a photo of her pointing to the very place, she couldn’t find those houses because so many more had been built around them that the hillsides were totally covered.”
During the Second World War, the number of houses being built in the United States was close to zero. However, William J. Levitt created the notion of mass housing in the country. He had originally tried to make the idea work back in the 1920s, but after the war, it really kicked into gear.
Levitt had been inspired by Henry Ford’s car assembly line and used the concept to create many domestic buildings in a short period of time. Naturally, though, the houses built were small and simple, with just two bedrooms, no basement and no garage. The first site on which they were built was named Levittown.
The key phrase in Reynolds’ song was the fact that the “little boxes” are “all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look the same”. Meanwhile, “Ticky-tacky” refers to the low-cost building materials that were used – the builders used sheetrock rather than plaster and asbestos tiles, which would, of course, eventually disintegrate. By the 1950s, Levitt’s workforce was in full swing; he claimed that his team could build a house in just 15 minutes, and little Levittowns began springing up all across America.
One of those housing developments was spotted by Malvina Reynolds, who understood the nature of their low-cost/low quality and satirised them in her song. When the song was popularised a year later, in 1963, by Pete Seeger, the American consciousness awoke to the kind of manipulative building that had been going on behind their backs, which became all the more evident when those ‘Little Boxes’ began to crumble.
Check out both Malvina Reynolds’ and Pete Seeger’s versions of the song below.
