“The elements of this song came from the famous novel, “And Quiet Flows the Don”, a story of Czarist Russia. In one of the early chapters, it describes the Cossack soldiers galloping off to join the Czar’s army. And they’re singing and they quoted three lines: “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. Gallop, gallop, gallop, wheee!” A few years went by, and I’m sitting in a plane when all of a sudden came a line I had thought about five years earlier: “long time passing.” I fitted the two together, along with the intellectual’s perennial complaint, “When will we ever learn?””Pete Seeger (354)

“This was adapted from the Book of Ecclesiastes.”Pete Seeger (355)