Sunday Concert: Ecclesiastes

Turn, Turn, Turn-
To Everything There is a Season

It was interesting to hear this week, on NPR I think, that the reason the Beatles stopped live concerts was that they could not hear each other for the screaming fans and felt their skills were not improving because of that. So they became a studio group. Listening to the juvenile screams of the Byrds' fans helps me to understand that. I have enjoyed Pete Seeger since the early sixties - I heard Turn Turn Turn before the Byrds recorded it. I was flattered once when my mother heard Pete singing on record, and when she came into the room said she had thought it was my voice.

This song is one of the few pop songs ever to have come so directly from the Bible, yet the handwritten original was owned by the Communist Party of the United States until 2007, according to Wikipedia. (Alas, Pete was indeed, until 1950, a Communist.)

Here's the famous Byrds rendition and then a discussion by members of the Byrds and by Pete of the origins of the song.