Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
” On the plane, he pulled out his pocket-size song notebook: “Leafing through it, I came across three lines I’d written down, oh, at least a year or two before: ‘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.’ ” He’d read this in a novel by Mikhail Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don, the three lines came from a Ukrainian folk song. For a year he had searched around for the original song, then given up, jotting down this fragment in hopes of using it some day. This time he glanced at the words, and “things just slipped into place.” For four or five years, Pete had also carried a musical phrase in his head, like an old man saving string: “long time passing.” He had been struck by its melodic beauty: the four vowel sounds are sequential, opening up the mouth as they are sung. “All I knew was that those were three words I wanted to use in a song; I wasn’t quite sure how, where, or when. Sudden
