Little Boxes

"Little Boxes"
Single by The Womenfolk
Format	7" single
Recorded	1962
Genre	Folk
Length	1:03
Label	RCA Victor 47-8301
Writer(s)	Malvina Reynolds
Producer	Al Schmidt, Gil Garfield, Perry Botkin, Jr.

An example of the middle-class housing satirized in "Little Boxes": Levittown, Pennsylvania, one of the first major post-World War II housing developments in the United States.

"Little Boxes" is a song written by Malvina Reynolds in 1962, which became a hit for her friend Pete Seeger in 1963.

The song is a political satire about the development of suburbia and associated conformist middle-class attitudes. It refers to suburban tract housing as "little boxes" of different colors "all made out of ticky-tacky", and which "all look just the same." "Ticky-tacky" is a reference to the shoddy material used in the construction of housing of that time.

Background

Reynolds was a folk singer-songwriter and political activist in the 1960s. Nancy Reynolds, her daughter, explained that her mother came up with the song when she saw the housing developments around Daly City, California built in the post-war era by Henry Doelger, particularly the neighborhood of Westlake.

My mother and father were driving South from San Francisco through Daly City when my mom got the idea for the song. She asked my dad to take the wheel, and she wrote it on the way to the gathering in La Honda where she was going to sing for the Friends Committee on Legislation. When Time magazine (I think, maybe Newsweek) wanted a photo of her pointing to the very place, she couldn’t find those houses because so many more had been built around them that the hillsides were totally covered.

Pete Seeger's rendition of the song is known internationally, and reached number 70 in the Billboard Hot 100; Seeger was a friend of Reynolds, also a political activist, and like many others in the 1960s he used folk songs as a medium for protest.

Reception

The profundity of the satire is attested by a university professor of the time who said that, "I've been lecturing my classes about middle-class conformity for a whole semester. Here's a song that says it all in 1½ minutes."

The term "ticky-tacky" became a catchphrase during the 1960s, attesting to the song's popularity. Tom Lehrer described "Little Boxes" as "the most sanctimonious song ever written".

Covers

The song has been recorded by a number of musicians, including Death Cab For Cutie, Rise Against, Regina Spektor, The Shins and The Womenfolk. Other musicians have arranged and translated the song to meet their styles. The lyrics have been reprinted with photographs of "Little Box" houses in environmental publications.

The version of the song by The Womenfolk is the shortest single ever to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 at 1:03 minutes long.^{[citation needed]} The Spanish songwriter Adolfo Celdrán wrote the first Spanish version of the song, called "Cajitas", which was published in 1969 and had several successive reissues. Another Spanish version of the song, "Las Casitas del Barrio Alto," was written by the Chilean songwriter Víctor Jara in 1971, depicting in a mocking way the over-Europeanized and bourgeois lifestyle of the residents of the "Barrio Alto" (high-class neighborhood) in Santiago de Chile. A French version with the title "Petites boîtes" was performed by Graeme Allwright and was later covered by Kate and Anna McGarrigle on their 2003 album La vache qui pleure. Other artists who have covered the song include Chester Bennington of Linkin Park, The Shins, Regina Spektor, Randy Newman, Rise Against, Devendra Banhart, Phosphorescent, Man Man, The Submarines, Death Cab For Cutie, The Real Tuesday Weld, Rilo Kiley, Elvis Costello, and The Decemberists who expanded the song with several new verses.

In popular culture

• The song was performed on the BBC satirical television program That Was The Week That Was on April 13, 1964, sung by Nancy Ames and accompanied by a film montage by Guy Fraumeni and Lou Myers depicting tract housing and other related images.
• In the 1975 novel Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach, describing a secessionist ecological utopia in the western United States, the protagonist (visiting the country as a US journalist) is informed that “cheaply built houses in newer districts” are scornfully referred to as “ticky-tacky boxes” by the population.
• "Little Boxes" is the signature tune of BBC Radio 4 comedy series Robin and Wendy's Wet Weekends, sung by Kay Stonham in the character of "Wendy Mayfield" to a background of inept coaching by Simon Greenall as her husband "Robin".
• A 2006 book about Westlake, Little Boxes: The Architecture of a Classic Midcentury Suburb, is named for the song.
• The song is used as the opening theme song for the Showtime television series Weeds. The first season used Reynolds's own recording as the theme song. The second and third seasons used versions by nearly thirty different musicians. After the third season, the song was not used in the credits regularly; however, it appears or is referenced from time to time. For a complete list of artists who have recorded this song for the show, see opening music of Weeds.
• The song is also used by the Italian journalist Gianluca Nicoletti as the opening song for his radio show Melog, on air daily on the Italian national network Radio 24 since the 9th of January 2006.
• This song is sung by both Keith Carradine (as "Elton Tripp") and Kate Mara (as "Zoe Tripp") in the 2005 film The Californians
• "Little Boxes" is the theme song for "Xurupita´s Farm II", a recurring sketch about a reality TV show on the Brazilian comedy program Pânico na TV.

See also

• Urban sprawl
• Suburb
• Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Bob Merrill's 1952 song, that uses the same tune.

References

Notes

External links

• Smith, Charles H.; Nancy Schimmel. "Little Boxes". Malvina Reynolds: Song Lyrics and Poems. http://www.wku.edu/%7Esmithch/MALVINA/mr094.htm.  with a list of recordings
• "Music". Weeds. Showtime Networks. http://www.sho.com/site/weeds/music.do.  Full list of music used on the show
• "America's Most Perfect Ticky-Tacky Suburb". Telstar Logistics. November 7, 2006. http://telstarlogistics.typepad.com/telstarlogistics/2006/11/americas_most_p.html. 
• Adolfo Celdrán Spanish language homepage
• Rob Keil's website for Little Boxes: The Architecture of a Classic Midcentury Suburb
• Smoking Boxes the bossa nova band Zeep covers "Little Boxes" for freely downloadable album The Box, with versions in both English and Portuguese.
• Bity Booker "Little Boxes" (Malvina Reynolds's cover) LIVE http://www.facebook.com/bitybookermusic