We were very poor when I was a child….lived in a “tin can” trailer in Arizona….my dad then built us one of those “little boxes” and we loved the indoor plumbing and shower….I still drive by our old “little box” house with many great memories. I went on to become one of those doctors in the song and have never regretted the “gift” of poverty!
@@MaryRoseLaughing It was in my family in the 1700's Ireland! Ugly old castles and constant conflicts in the family and with the Irish. But I still wish I had 🤑 wealth!!!
@@luisavila8342 I remember the teacher who gave me this song to listen to, and he must have known it would change me. Because as you say, ever since that moment, I realized, that society was categorizing and can't be hauling everybody into little boxes. And I also decided never to be boxed in by anybody. spent most of my life off grid. Don't think I ever directly paid a penny tax, and yes this song changed the viewpoints of generations of children
You can watch these videos, but I must mind my Fascist Bork Account, because our Fascist Bork Accounts are all made of Ticky-Tacky, and they all look just the same... Does anyone know if this song was inspired by Paradise California?
@@aaronfreeman5264 Apparently inspired by tract housing in Dale City, California. I once heard that it was inspired by the same kind of housing in Toronto, Canada; but I can't remember where I read that.
Thought out my life ,I used this song to remind me of what not to be.But its been a hard trip to live outside what the world thinks is normal. It took me on a very exciting Rollercoaster of a life and I got to do things people only dream about ,But I also paid a very high price not being the norm...I have the worlds best memories, but not much more .
Whatever price you have paid my dear...I hope right now you are a happy person after realising that you left the norm. Sorry for the price you paid. I would love to hear more about you and your memories. Take care!
Little Boxes.... A perfect description of what society & institutions demand of us. Some of us comply & some manage to become that which they are or wish to be.... This song made a big impact on me in my youth & helped me to realise that I hold the ability to decide for myself who I want to be while making us of those institutions of learning to equip myself to accomplish who I am and who I ultimate wish to be. I thank God for ones individuality & the securing of exactly that !
I always wished to be the Little Boxes life in a Little Boxes suburb with all the happy children and happy families and normalness I dreamed people in Little Boxes got to be.
I heard this song in the 60's at day camp and decided then I didn't want go to university or be the same.I've spent my whole life with self taught people who were nonconformists,spoke other languages and thought differently.I never got rich in money,yet feel I've gone to university of life and learned so much.
It’s cause this guys voice sounds so soothing it sounds like my great grandfather and his message can be taken as we’re all just little ants being put into to homes or well we all are just the same in that we all live and grow and find a home no matter how small or big we are well comfortable in how we all have a home in these little boxes we can home
dis song rily speaks to me, comin frm 1 of Africa's poorest country's cn only imagine da day whn we hav dis typical society where we all put into little box n we the same as the whole world
The more I go back and actually think about the themes and symbolism in things I watched and listened to as a child, the more things start to make a lot more sense. I didn't really realize the meaning as a kid, but I definitely understood it well enough for it to influence me. This song is no exception.
Its so ironic. This song was critical of life in the 60s, but now it's more aspirational. Now the kids graduate from the university and live at home with their parents, complaining about college debt. We didn't know how good we had it. If I was raising kids now, I'd tell them to go to trade school, get an apprenticeship. Unless you are majoring in something in high demand, college is a waste of money.
It occurred to me as I was cooking dinner tonight and singing this song that Pete was sh*ting on all the people who couldn't afford to life the kind of life he did. I like Pete, I always will. Just mulling the whole thing over.
"Little Boxes" is a protest song written and composed by Malvina Reynolds in 1962, which became a hit for her friend Pete Seeger in 1963. Malvina Reynolds was the fucking woman. :)
Was told this song meant that if everybody does the same thing in the almost exact way and the kids become like there parents then nothing ever changes and life is boring. That’s why it’s good to be unique in your own way. Like if everyone does everything the same and thinks the same way then nothing will ever get done.
This was real popular around the Vietnam war. There’s a photo that came out of all the coffins draped with flags in a plane. End it was this song that topped it off. It’s a wonderful folk song with a lot of different meanings
Did you ever hear about the suburbanite who didn't realize he got off the commuter train at the wrong station until he got up to his front door and the key didn't fit?
+TnseWlms That happened to me when I lived in downtown Oakland in an apartment building. I might have been a little drunk, but for what ever reason I got off at the wrong floor and went to where my apartment was (on the other floor) and tried to fit my key into the lock about 3 times. I didn't realize what I was doing until the door swung open and a 6 foot 6, 300 pound black guy with a beard said "What the hell you doin' boy?" Ummmmm ... not... trying to break into your house.... really. I'll go now.
hitty9 I really don't think this is only about bad neighbourhood. its more about how people submit themselves into the system without questioning authority
As a child I loved the warmth and intimacy of Pete Seegers voice on this track, it was like being cuddled by my Dad. I'd go back to those days in an instant.
I would happily take one of those "little boxes" that Malvena Reynolds so sarcastically writes about in contrast to the piles of state-owned concrete public housing of the Soviet Union for whom she and Pete Seeger were apologists. Inside those "little boxes" were the families of returning GI's who defeated both Naziism and the Japanese and in a couple of more decades the communists. I expect those little boxes looked pretty good compared to the battlefields they'd left behind. They had freedom and the ability to do as they pleased without having to worry about Big Brother. They also had pastel appliances, color TV's and air-conditioning and outside Easter-egg hued cars with chrome and tailfins. They could shop at super markets bulging with produce and every kind of food imaginable and didn't have to wait in queues every day hoping for a scrap of three day old bread. I guess a song about concrete housing projects doesn't come across as particularly appealing? You also notice that both Reynolds and Seeger lived in the US, enjoying its freedoms while all the time hating the capitalist system that provided them.
You really should credit the songwriter here .... As much as I have the Mr Seeger version engrained in my soul, the real inspiration is due to Malvina Reynolds
I bought a copy of an album titled "Pete Seeger's Greatest Hits", and was much amused by the text he wrote on the back, suggesting that the songs on it were not so much "hits" that had flared up for awhile and then been forgotten, and were more like old friends you'd come back to year after year, and maybe one of them was like a spouse whom you'd look up at, after many years of marriage, and realize that you loved them all the more. He loved his own wife intensely, of course. I loved mine, too.
Song was written in 1962, became popular with Pete Seeger's performance a year later. It seemed like a scathing indictment at the time. No one could have predicted that 55 years later those little boxes might cost you half a million or more and be out of the reach of most people.
Although Pete Seeger recorded this song, we should note that it was written by the great Malvina Reynolds, a very under appreciated American songwriter.
We learned the song in English lessons at school (I'm German-speaking) and it's engraved in my brain. Every time I see rows of uniform houses somewhere, it immediately goes through my head. And when I was in the USA for the first time and saw the unbelievable, endless expanses of uniform suburbs from the airplane window, I finally knew what image inspired the central metaphor of this song.
This has a misleading title as the song is by Malvina Reynolds, a friend of his. It cannot be covered badly, apparently, but Pete has a way of putting tings right where they go.
My grandfather when I was in college, I march with Martin Luther King in Washington, fighting for the people and equality, but after finishing studying, he got married, had my mother and lived in a little box
When I was little, my grandma has a digital encyclopedia that had audio on some of the entries. This was the one for Pete. I don’t remember if it had the whole song or just the first few seconds, but I always thought it was just about boxes sitting on a grassy hill.
Looking back, I find my perspectives have changes. The "little boxes" came into being because in the days following WWII, there were critical shortages of family housing. "Levitt Towns" allowed for affordable homes that could be constructed rapidly, and truth be told, they offered a good value, compared to the tract homes of today, which are often built with substandard materials and shoddy workmanship. Yes, there were doctors, and lawyers, and business executives who came out of universities, but the good news is that higher education was more affordable to many, and blue collar workers could also afford to buy modest homes and raise families on one income. Maybe those "little boxes" weren't such bad ideas after all.
Max Steiner I remember it as a 7 year old living in A Newtown in England.. it really meant something to me and still does. our little boxes were lemon, mushroom and cream.. ours was a working class neighbourhood
Brilliant song! Glad to find it on here --- have remembered it for some 50-60 years! (Don't know if Pete Seeger sang the original but this sounds right)
in southern england, the houses are all the same bloody colour " GARDINIA " (or magnolia indoors ) so Petes' neighbours had more imagination than mine, lucky sod. Love from the new forest X
I was speaking with a teacher recently and brought up this Malvina Reed song, Schools and teaching are about conforming plain and simple. From childhood to adulthood it's conform, conform CONFORM. I'm proud to say that I kicked over the traces early on and have had a wonderful life despite my so called non conformity. The conformists can bite me! lol
Leah, Education in Norway is relentlessly NONconformist; which results in children (and eventually, adults) who can problem solve better than any other population on the planet.
This is the version that became popular in 1963. It was composed by Malvina Reynolds in 1962 and her version on UA-cam is superior to Seeger's in that it better conveys the spirit of the lyrics. Supposedly tract housing in Dale City, California was the inspiration for the famous "ticky-tacky" phrase, a comment on the low quality materials used for building tract houses. The song was lauded by the "hip" in those days for its satire on middle class conformity, but over the intervening years, the satire has turned upon itself and and the lyrics have acquired a double-edge in that suburban uniformity enabled doctors, lawyers, and business executives to rise from lower class families into more comfortable lives. In other words, conformity isn't all bad when it serves to improve the lives of so many.
There is good in every year and every generation. Find the good in the 2020s. It's there. Find it, cling to it, strengthen it. Find the coal in the ashes and nurture it into a roaring blaze. Find the healthy sprouts and water and fertilize them. Pull unbroken boards out of the wreckage and build a new shelter. Find the surviving children and feed them and teach them.
@@darlenegriffith6186 It was one of my favorite songs when I was a child. Also, my aunt, whom I adored, lived across from the neighborhood in the San Francisco suburb where the pastel-colored "little boxes" stood, row on row of ticky-tacky. I was delighted to see the very boxes themselves. The life I lived with my parents is over, though. So is the life I lived with my wife and my children - the children are grown and the house we all loved has been sold and (tragically) had to be demolished and my wife has died. We all had to build new lives. So, we move on, we rebuild.
@@arcadiaberger9204 I'm so sorry that you have had to face such grief. I wish you well and hope that you find happiness in this journey that we call life.
I've been looking for this song for years. I had seen it on a TV show, and I thought it was about houses. That's all I could remember. And happened to run into it tonight. I know, no big deal, but it's all I get..lol
Love is Never boring. Like one flame can light over and over. Love never dies. Also means love for our brothhers. Lisa 1956. 59 Now. Seen some. Learned alot
Reminds me of when i was a baby and this was on the wireless a lot my mum left me in the living room whilst she did the kitchen and I remember being entertained by this
It's been ever thus since we started pushing plows all day so that a distant pharaoh could be buried in a giant mausoleum with a pile of gold around him. 5,000 years of this shit. Time for a change.
@@eileenrose1898 By realizing we don't have to live that existence anymore. It's only an idea of how to live now, it's not based in any actual material need.
Thanks!! I just started watching "Weeds" for which this is the theme song. I guess it's an anti-establishment song. It's so hard to be an orthodox Marxist nowadays in a laissez faire capitalist society.
Life as described in this song existed for about 30 years. And it was the peak of human existence. Everything before and everything after has been nightmarish in comparison.
The "little boxes" -- the tracts of inexpensive housing built from the late 1940s through the 1960s -- represented a successful response to the severe post-WWII housing shortage. Contrary to the song, they didn't house upper-middle-class lawyers and doctors. They housed blue collar and middle middle class families who, for the first time in the 1950s, were enjoying a period of growth and prosperity, after having lived through the crushing poverty of the depression and the privations of the war. Tom Lehrer (supposedly) described this song aptly as "the most sanctimonious song ever written." Much as I like Pete Seeger and the whole Seeger clan.
The song, it seems to me, is actually about the poignant sadness of a culture of conformity; the houses are a symbol. Pete is a poet, and he was using a contemporary image to deliver a relevant message; it would be like using the smartphone as an image of alienation, even though the smartphone is a very impressive machine. Don't you think any technology can be good or bad, this kind of housing included? But as for soul-sucking conformity, when can that ever be good?
@@lukehall8151 No, this is why the working class conservatives hate the middle class leftists. Making fun of their limited resources. And Seeger was an Ivy League/Prep School leftist and Communist at one time.
Born in 1954 to a Korean conflict vet, I grew up in ticky-tacky houses, for my first 12 years of life on military bases and until age 19 in suburban developments. Compared to the early depression and war era my parents grew up in, it was heaven. Good schools, abundant and affordable housing, food, cars, and fuel. Plenty of job opportunities, excellent recreational and medical facilities. We wanted for nothing. Life was extremely Good. Ol' Pete would have been labeled a sanctimonious and ungrateful commie by my father. I tend to agree with that. It's no wonder his music never played in our house. I count the mid 50s to the mid 70s as a golden era, and a wonderful time to have grown up in.
@@crazyfishmonster459 I have been able to break the rut... Now helping people break this chain of being put into boxes generations after generations. What about you?
One of my teachers in school, before highschool, introduced us to this song. Caused an early awareness to the box system, which I have never agreed with. I have always done my own thing. Some people find their anxiety to do the same exposed by that. They respond with anger. I always had to deal with that.
Folk singers pretty much all look the same. And, indeed think the same. And indeed, sound the same. When Dylan tried to sound different,Pete tried to cut the wires with an axe.
In our neighborhood a real estate agent was trying to sell a perfectly good house worth a million, but had trouble because the house next door was painted cyan.
Bahamas baby! But really, victorian homes were wildly colorful like easter eggs, the south has pink homes. And back in the day pink wasnt an atrocious color. Cars were pink, men wore pink, entire batrooms were friggin PINK PINK.
And you drive a steel and glass box to your big corporate box then back 'round to your home box then you stare at your screen box and then your handheld box then shop at a big box store...
I guess I grew up in one of those houses. Never knew I was supposed to despise it. Looks nothing like it did when my parents moved in. In fact most of the houses on the street look completely different.
We were very poor when I was a child….lived in a “tin can” trailer in Arizona….my dad then built us one of those “little boxes” and we loved the indoor plumbing and shower….I still drive by our old “little box” house with many great memories. I went on to become one of those doctors in the song and have never regretted the “gift” of poverty!
I'm glad you broke out of that "gift" of poverty and became a doctor and able to afford a wonderful Little Boxes house!
@@carolynking1625 But we never felt “poor” as kids!
@@azgrapefruit That's wonderful 👍😊. It's sad more people aren't like you.
Great wealth is a curse.
@@MaryRoseLaughing It was in my family in the 1700's Ireland! Ugly old castles and constant conflicts in the family and with the Irish. But I still wish I had 🤑 wealth!!!
Heard this as a kid, made me never want to be put in a box and been fighting it ever since....RIP Pete, you were truly a great man.
Keep up the good fight!!
I have got a way to break the rut too... have you been able to break the chain?
For you 😉
ua-cam.com/video/Ow0lr63y4Mw/v-deo.html
Fyi: little boxes was written by malvina reynolds
@@luisavila8342 I remember the teacher who gave me this song to listen to, and he must have known it would change me. Because as you say, ever since that moment, I realized, that society was categorizing and can't be hauling everybody into little boxes. And I also decided never to be boxed in by anybody. spent most of my life off grid. Don't think I ever directly paid a penny tax, and yes this song changed the viewpoints of generations of children
...and we all watch this video....on our boxes, little boxes all the same...RIP, Pete
You can watch these videos, but I must mind my Fascist Bork Account, because our Fascist Bork Accounts are all made of Ticky-Tacky, and they all look just the same...
Does anyone know if this song was inspired by Paradise California?
LOL!!
@@aaronfreeman5264 Apparently inspired by tract housing in Dale City, California. I once heard that it was inspired by the same kind of housing in Toronto, Canada; but I can't remember where I read that.
@@semireckless Daley City
@@msminicooper2010 Yes, I stand corrected, Daley City.
My family had just moved into Westlake, Daly City when this song started playing on KYA. We lived in the yellow one.
Thought out my life ,I used this song to remind me of what not to be.But its been a hard trip to live outside what the world thinks is normal. It took me on a very exciting Rollercoaster of a life and I got to do things people only dream about ,But I also paid a very high price not being the norm...I have the worlds best memories, but not much more .
Whatever price you have paid my dear...I hope right now you are a happy person after realising that you left the norm. Sorry for the price you paid. I would love to hear more about you and your memories. Take care!
my dad used to play this song for me all the time when I was young. I completely forgot about it and spent so long looking for it. my heart 🥺💕
I think he was trying to tell you something.
My dad too👌
It was my mother's song. She sang it any time we saw a development with all that sameness I longed to be part of but she looked down on.
My first taste of activism, when I was young, ... very young. Thanks Peter, heaven is waiting for you love.
Little Boxes.... A perfect description of what society & institutions demand of us. Some of us comply & some manage to become that which they are or wish to be.... This song made a big impact on me in my youth & helped me to realise that I hold the ability to decide for myself who I want to be while making us of those institutions of learning to equip myself to accomplish who I am and who I ultimate wish to be. I thank God for ones individuality & the securing of exactly that !
"I thank God for ones individuality & the securing of exactly that". Perfect example of living in a box.
I always wished to be the Little Boxes life in a Little Boxes suburb with all the happy children and happy families and normalness I dreamed people in Little Boxes got to be.
I heard this song in the 60's at day camp and decided then I didn't want go to university or be the same.I've spent my whole life with self taught people who were nonconformists,spoke other languages and thought differently.I never got rich in money,yet feel I've gone to university of life and learned so much.
This poem - song either freaks you out or or makes you feel safe
It’s cause this guys voice sounds so soothing it sounds like my great grandfather and his message can be taken as we’re all just little ants being put into to homes or well we all are just the same in that we all live and grow and find a home no matter how small or big we are well comfortable in how we all have a home in these little boxes we can home
...or it inspires you.
dis song rily speaks to me, comin frm 1 of Africa's poorest country's cn only imagine da day whn we hav dis typical society where we all put into little box n we the same as the whole world
The more I go back and actually think about the themes and symbolism in things I watched and listened to as a child, the more things start to make a lot more sense. I didn't really realize the meaning as a kid, but I definitely understood it well enough for it to influence me. This song is no exception.
I learned all the verses to "This land is my land" from my first grade music teacher and I am certain that my politics solidified around those lyrics.
Its so ironic. This song was critical of life in the 60s, but now it's more aspirational. Now the kids graduate from the university and live at home with their parents, complaining about college debt. We didn't know how good we had it. If I was raising kids now, I'd tell them to go to trade school, get an apprenticeship. Unless you are majoring in something in high demand, college is a waste of money.
It occurred to me as I was cooking dinner tonight and singing this song that Pete was sh*ting on all the people who couldn't afford to life the kind of life he did. I like Pete, I always will. Just mulling the whole thing over.
Pete Seeger was the fucking man.
"Little Boxes" is a protest song written and composed by Malvina Reynolds in 1962, which became a hit for her friend Pete Seeger in 1963.
Malvina Reynolds was the fucking woman. :)
Was told this song meant that if everybody does the same thing in the almost exact way and the kids become like there parents then nothing ever changes and life is boring. That’s why it’s good to be unique in your own way. Like if everyone does everything the same and thinks the same way then nothing will ever get done.
This was real popular around the Vietnam war. There’s a photo that came out of all the coffins draped with flags in a plane. End it was this song that topped it off.
It’s a wonderful folk song with a lot of different meanings
Did you ever hear about the suburbanite who didn't realize he got off the commuter train at the wrong station until he got up to his front door and the key didn't fit?
hahaha......
+TnseWlms That happened to me when I lived in downtown Oakland in an apartment building. I might have been a little drunk, but for what ever reason I got off at the wrong floor and went to where my apartment was (on the other floor) and tried to fit my key into the lock about 3 times. I didn't realize what I was doing until the door swung open and a 6 foot 6, 300 pound black guy with a beard said "What the hell you doin' boy?" Ummmmm ... not... trying to break into your house.... really. I'll go now.
Err, maybe better save up and move to a better neighborhood?
hitty9 I really don't think this is only about bad neighbourhood. its more about how people submit themselves into the system without questioning authority
hitty9 and
Favorite Seeger song. Saw him twice live, I small venues. What a great performer. Couldn't help but sing along. Truly an all-ages show! RIP Pete!
I love Malvina Reynolds version, she wrote the song.
As a child I loved the warmth and intimacy of Pete Seegers voice on this track, it was like being cuddled by my Dad. I'd go back to those days in an instant.
So relevant with current going’s on! It’s time to step out of the matrix, step out of the box and find freedom!!!! ❤
I would happily take one of those "little boxes" that Malvena Reynolds so sarcastically writes about in contrast to the piles of state-owned concrete public housing of the Soviet Union for whom she and Pete Seeger were apologists. Inside those "little boxes" were the families of returning GI's who defeated both Naziism and the Japanese and in a couple of more decades the communists. I expect those little boxes looked pretty good compared to the battlefields they'd left behind. They had freedom and the ability to do as they pleased without having to worry about Big Brother. They also had pastel appliances, color TV's and air-conditioning and outside Easter-egg hued cars with chrome and tailfins. They could shop at super markets bulging with produce and every kind of food imaginable and didn't have to wait in queues every day hoping for a scrap of three day old bread. I guess a song about concrete housing projects doesn't come across as particularly appealing? You also notice that both Reynolds and Seeger lived in the US, enjoying its freedoms while all the time hating the capitalist system that provided them.
You really should credit the songwriter here .... As much as I have the Mr Seeger version engrained in my soul, the real inspiration is due to Malvina Reynolds
She was thinking of those boxy houses that were developed near Daly City. You can still see them on the hillside.
Amazing lyrics!!! This song should be the new american national anthem.
Trust me, there are LOTS of Americans who are threatened by people who don't live in "ticky tacky boxes".
Peaked at No. 70 on the Billboard Hot 100, Pete’s one and ONLY ever Billboard Hot 100 Chart entry, believe it or not.
I bought a copy of an album titled "Pete Seeger's Greatest Hits", and was much amused by the text he wrote on the back, suggesting that the songs on it were not so much "hits" that had flared up for awhile and then been forgotten, and were more like old friends you'd come back to year after year, and maybe one of them was like a spouse whom you'd look up at, after many years of marriage, and realize that you loved them all the more.
He loved his own wife intensely, of course. I loved mine, too.
I will miss you... thank you for my childhood memories. I used to sing this song with my Dad.
Song was written in 1962, became popular with Pete Seeger's performance a year later. It seemed like a scathing indictment at the time. No one could have predicted that 55 years later those little boxes might cost you half a million or more and be out of the reach of most people.
I remember singing this in my Fourth Grade singing class back in 1964.
Although Pete Seeger recorded this song, we should note that it was written by the great Malvina Reynolds, a very under appreciated American songwriter.
Indeed....
We learned the song in English lessons at school (I'm German-speaking) and it's engraved in my brain. Every time I see rows of uniform houses somewhere, it immediately goes through my head. And when I was in the USA for the first time and saw the unbelievable, endless expanses of uniform suburbs from the airplane window, I finally knew what image inspired the central metaphor of this song.
When I was younger I thought the Boxes were a metaphor for coffins. Saying we can do all these things but in the end we all end up in a box.
Cemeteries are just suburbs for dead people
Tom Lehrer was right to call this the most sanctimonious song ever written
Tom who?
Ah, Pete. It's been such a long strange trip knowin ya. Thanks for all the life and heart lessons.
This has a misleading title as the song is by Malvina Reynolds, a friend of his. It cannot be covered badly, apparently, but Pete has a way of putting tings right where they go.
My grandfather when I was in college, I march with Martin Luther King in Washington, fighting for the people and equality, but after finishing studying, he got married, had my mother and lived in a little box
Yes! and thank you Pete Seeger for being a giant of my youth.
When I was little, my grandma has a digital encyclopedia that had audio on some of the entries. This was the one for Pete. I don’t remember if it had the whole song or just the first few seconds, but I always thought it was just about boxes sitting on a grassy hill.
One of John Lydon's all-time favourite songs. I like the way he pronounces "just", it sounds like a Northern England accent.
This is a nice rendition of a Malvina Reynold's song which she wrote in 1962 which became a hit for her friend Pete Seeger!
Looking back, I find my perspectives have changes. The "little boxes" came into being because in the days following WWII, there were critical shortages of family housing. "Levitt Towns" allowed for affordable homes that could be constructed rapidly, and truth be told, they offered a good value, compared to the tract homes of today, which are often built with substandard materials and shoddy workmanship.
Yes, there were doctors, and lawyers, and business executives who came out of universities, but the good news is that higher education was more affordable to many, and blue collar workers could also afford to buy modest homes and raise families on one income.
Maybe those "little boxes" weren't such bad ideas after all.
Qqqqq
There is a reason for boxes' existence, it serves a need for society. However, we should not expect EVERYONE to want to be a box too
The point is that everyone is indoctrinated to be exactly the same. The boxes just got bigger but the premise is the same.
Silence Liberal. Communism Will Win. 🚩
Those little boxes today probably sell form 350,000 to 500,000.
All the hippies ironically became little boxes whose children went to university and came out all the same. No joke.
I'm so glad my mother introduced me to this when I was a child (early 80's).
Max Steiner I remember it as a 7 year old living in A Newtown in England.. it really meant something to me and still does. our little boxes were lemon, mushroom and cream.. ours was a working class neighbourhood
Max Steiner : I got introduced to it as a child as well (early 60's, lol)
Brilliant song! Glad to find it on here --- have remembered it for some 50-60 years! (Don't know if Pete Seeger sang the original but this sounds right)
in southern england, the houses are all the same bloody colour " GARDINIA " (or magnolia indoors ) so Petes' neighbours had more imagination than mine, lucky sod. Love from the new forest X
I love your all songs peter💝💝💝
Inspires us to do our thinking outside the box.
23 and feel so much from this song. So much meaning.
I was speaking with a teacher recently and brought up this Malvina Reed song, Schools and teaching are about conforming plain and simple. From childhood to adulthood it's conform, conform CONFORM. I'm proud to say that I kicked over the traces early on and have had a wonderful life despite my so called non conformity. The conformists can bite me! lol
Malvina Reynolds (not Reed). : )
Leah, Education in Norway is relentlessly NONconformist; which results in children (and eventually, adults) who can problem solve better than any other population on the planet.
So, you don't like people who don't conform to your brand of nonconformity? Got it.
This is the version that became popular in 1963. It was composed by Malvina Reynolds in 1962 and her version on UA-cam is superior to Seeger's in that it better conveys the spirit of the lyrics. Supposedly tract housing in Dale City, California was the inspiration for the famous "ticky-tacky" phrase, a comment on the low quality materials used for building tract houses.
The song was lauded by the "hip" in those days for its satire on middle class conformity, but over the intervening years, the satire has turned upon itself and and the lyrics have acquired a double-edge in that suburban uniformity enabled doctors, lawyers, and business executives to rise from lower class families into more comfortable lives. In other words, conformity isn't all bad when it serves to improve the lives of so many.
Thank you. Malvina Reynolds needs more credit
Melvina's version hits better for sure.
One of my grandpa’s favorite songs to be honest I wish life was like it was back then I truly would have loved to live what was and not what is
There is good in every year and every generation.
Find the good in the 2020s. It's there. Find it, cling to it, strengthen it.
Find the coal in the ashes and nurture it into a roaring blaze.
Find the healthy sprouts and water and fertilize them.
Pull unbroken boards out of the wreckage and build a new shelter.
Find the surviving children and feed them and teach them.
@@arcadiaberger9204 I like your positive attitude!
@@darlenegriffith6186 It was one of my favorite songs when I was a child.
Also, my aunt, whom I adored, lived across from the neighborhood in the San Francisco suburb where the pastel-colored "little boxes" stood, row on row of ticky-tacky. I was delighted to see the very boxes themselves.
The life I lived with my parents is over, though.
So is the life I lived with my wife and my children - the children are grown and the house we all loved has been sold and (tragically) had to be demolished and my wife has died.
We all had to build new lives.
So, we move on, we rebuild.
@@arcadiaberger9204 I'm so sorry that you have had to face such grief. I wish you well and hope that you find happiness in this journey that we call life.
I've been looking for this song for years. I had seen it on a TV show, and I thought it was about houses. That's all I could remember.
And happened to run into it tonight.
I know, no big deal, but it's all I get..lol
Love it, and it is sung by Pete Seeger, but it was written by Malvina Reynolds
such a addictive song to listen to
this song gets stuck in my head
It’s a very catchy melody, i’ll give you that
The irony is that this song found its way into a box and everyone listening to it is listening from their own little box! 🤣
Thanks for putting this up, Claire. Marvellous.
Love is Never boring. Like one flame can light over and over. Love never dies. Also means love for our brothhers. Lisa 1956. 59 Now. Seen some. Learned alot
I'd forgotten about this. I lived this as a kid
Reminds me of when i was a baby and this was on the wireless a lot my mum left me in the living room whilst she did the kitchen and I remember being entertained by this
Damn, that is just what our schools and politicians are doing to this generation, putting them in boxes.
it's been happening since the end of WW1 and especially after WW2 not just this generation.
Churches have been indoctrinating the population for hundreds of years.
It's been ever thus since we started pushing plows all day so that a distant pharaoh could be buried in a giant mausoleum with a pile of gold around him. 5,000 years of this shit. Time for a change.
@@squamish4244 How?
@@eileenrose1898 By realizing we don't have to live that existence anymore. It's only an idea of how to live now, it's not based in any actual material need.
I was reading a bio on Alan Watts and it brought me here. This fits his ideology so well. This song is so surreal.
Released in 1964 and not much has changed except many people are having a hard time buying a box.
Talk about taking things for granted and being arrogant. Doing these mundane things well is what makes a society great.
Fantastic song fantastic post thank you so much
Thanks!! I just started watching "Weeds" for which this is the theme song. I guess it's an anti-establishment song. It's so hard to be an orthodox Marxist nowadays in a laissez faire capitalist society.
Pete Seeger - one of my all time Favorites in Music
Life as described in this song existed for about 30 years. And it was the peak of human existence. Everything before and everything after has been nightmarish in comparison.
This is my favorite song🎵🎵🎵🎵
Little Boxes Words and music by Malvina Reynolds
I Pete Seeger , too :))
My mom used to live in San Francisco. She told me all about this song and how it was inspired by Daly City.
1st time hearing 👂 it but really strikes a chord , 1 luv
The "little boxes" -- the tracts of inexpensive housing built from the late 1940s through the 1960s -- represented a successful response to the severe post-WWII housing shortage. Contrary to the song, they didn't house upper-middle-class lawyers and doctors. They housed blue collar and middle middle class families who, for the first time in the 1950s, were enjoying a period of growth and prosperity, after having lived through the crushing poverty of the depression and the privations of the war.
Tom Lehrer (supposedly) described this song aptly as "the most sanctimonious song ever written." Much as I like Pete Seeger and the whole Seeger clan.
The song, it seems to me, is actually about the poignant sadness of a culture of conformity; the houses are a symbol. Pete is a poet, and he was using a contemporary image to deliver a relevant message; it would be like using the smartphone as an image of alienation, even though the smartphone is a very impressive machine. Don't you think any technology can be good or bad, this kind of housing included? But as for soul-sucking conformity, when can that ever be good?
@@lukehall8151 No, this is why the working class conservatives hate the middle class leftists. Making fun of their limited resources. And Seeger was an Ivy League/Prep School leftist and Communist at one time.
I love you this song!
5 stars I Love this song.....
Haven't heard that in a long time. Thanks
Song by Malvina Reynolds, sung by Pete Seeger!
Malvina was great.
According to Pete she wrote a song every day before breakfast.
Born in 1954 to a Korean conflict vet, I grew up in ticky-tacky houses, for my first 12 years of life on military bases and until age 19 in suburban developments. Compared to the early depression and war era my parents grew up in, it was heaven. Good schools, abundant and affordable housing, food, cars, and fuel. Plenty of job opportunities, excellent recreational and medical facilities. We wanted for nothing. Life was extremely Good.
Ol' Pete would have been labeled a sanctimonious and ungrateful commie by my father. I tend to agree with that. It's no wonder his music never played in our house. I count the mid 50s to the mid 70s as a golden era, and a wonderful time to have grown up in.
Claire Sargent, you should have 500 million subscribers. :) thank you for the posts, even if there’s just three of them. :)
Pure Fribbance. Love it.
and they buy stuff from Amaaazon.....and they stare at their little I phones....
50 years of fighting against being put in boxes only to realise that we have slowly been building new boxes around us and putting ourselves into them.
@@crazyfishmonster459 Sitting in a "little box" while using my computer.
This luddite has avoided the iPhone so far. I am, though, surrounded by little boxes who vote the same.
@@crazyfishmonster459 I have been able to break the rut... Now helping people break this chain of being put into boxes generations after generations. What about you?
@@neilmallick2 Homie you homeless???
One of my teachers in school, before highschool, introduced us to this song.
Caused an early awareness to the box system, which I have never agreed with.
I have always done my own thing.
Some people find their anxiety to do the same exposed by that.
They respond with anger. I always had to deal with that.
Omg I just found this! This is awesome
Folk singers pretty much all look the same. And, indeed think the same. And indeed, sound the same. When Dylan tried to sound different,Pete tried to cut the wires with an axe.
Pink one? What HOA allows that?
In our neighborhood a real estate agent was trying to sell a perfectly good house worth a million, but had trouble because the house next door was painted cyan.
Nothing a coat of paint wouldn't fix.
San Francisco has these little houses on a hillside ,some are pink. Spanish style houses in California often have pink plaster , too.
@@mavisemberson8737 I'll vouch for that as I often drive by them.
Bahamas baby! But really, victorian homes were wildly colorful like easter eggs, the south has pink homes. And back in the day pink wasnt an atrocious color. Cars were pink, men wore pink, entire batrooms were friggin PINK PINK.
So prophetic
Really is neat how much this hold up
had to listen to this in ap us history
An excellent argument against the binary enforced by capitalism
"Little Boxes" "Pleasant Valley Sunday" perfect Normal Life sounds like something to be thankful for and love living.
I love 50s satire.
For those concerned it should be noted that current building codes nation wide prohibit the use of Ticky Tacky in residential construction.
Malvina Reynolds wrote this song and played it in our living room when I was about 7
And you drive a steel and glass box to your big corporate box then back 'round to your home box then you stare at your screen box and then your handheld box then shop at a big box store...
Lololol can’t believe they used ticky tacky boxes in the APUSH exam two years in a row XD (this year and last year)
Other version.
(Las casitas de barrio alto.)
By. Víctor Jara.
Yes Sir.
I like your music
Genius - Reminds me of Edward Scissorhands
And we go out in a box..
The song was actually written by Malvina Reynolds. RIP Pete.
The correct thing to say in the title would've been "...performed/sung by Pete Seeger. Written by Malvina Reynolds."
Levittown was like this. BUT humans moved in and now the boxes
are all DIFFERENT. Not so ticky tacky Pete...70 yrs later.
I guess I grew up in one of those houses. Never knew I was supposed to despise it. Looks nothing like it did when my parents moved in. In fact most of the houses on the street look completely different.
They used to play this to us as kids in junior school, it's dark as fuck!!!