The Byrds – Turn! Turn! Turn!
About The Song
“Turn! Turn! Turn!”, also known as or subtitled “To Everything There Is a Season”, is a song written by Pete Seeger in 1959. The lyrics – except for the title, which is repeated throughout the song, and the final two lines – consist of the first eight verses of the third chapter of the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes.
On October 1st 1965, The Byrds released their take on Pete Seeger song ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’ which would take their career to unprecedented heights and see them become the band of the moment. The track would become their joint highest-charting single which topped the charts on the US Billboard chart and was also their biggest hit on the other side of the Atlantic in Britain.
The idea of reviving the song came to McGuinn during The Byrds’ tour of the American Midwest in July 1965, a time when his then-girlfriend and future wife, Dolores, requested to hear the song whilst on the tour bus. When he then played the track, it was nothing like the original folk song and instead was in the style of The Byrds which made McGuinn feel compelled to get the band into the studio to record their take on the track—but little did he expect for it to become a number one single and the title track on their next record.
“It was a standard folk song by that time, but I played it and it came out rock ‘n’ roll because that’s what I was programmed to do like a computer. I couldn’t do it as it was traditionally,” McGuinn later explained. “I came out with that samba beat, and we thought it would make a good single.” The master recording of the song reportedly took the band a staggering 78 takes over five days to get right but boy did they nail it.
The song would then see The Byrds get lifted up to a pedestal where they were seen as being on the same level as The Beatles and The Beach Boys which they could never quite live up to. However, ‘Turn! Turn! Turn! still remains a bonafide classic that provides a glimpse of how things could have turned out for the band if the inner band relationships didn’t turn sour leading to a revolving door of lineup changes over the next few years.