Pete Seeger

Seeger wrote the song in 1959, setting the opening verses of Ecclesiastes 3 to a melody of his own and adding only the title phrase and the final two lines. He recorded it himself for The Bitter and the Sweet, cut live for Columbia and produced by John Hammond — but that release came out after the Limeliters’. It is one of the odder facts about one of the most-covered songs of the century: the man who wrote it was not the first person to release it.