Little Boxes

“Little Boxes” is a song written and composed by Malvina Reynolds in 1962. The song was first released by her friend, Pete Seeger, in 1963, and became his only charting single in January 1964. The song is a social satire about the development of suburbia and associated conformist middle-class attitudes. It mocks 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 supposedly used in the construction of the houses. Reynolds was a folk singer-songwriter and political activist in the 1960s and 1970s. Nancy Reynolds, her daughter, explained that her mother wrote the song after seeing the housing developments around Daly City, California, built in the post-war era by Henry Doelger, particularly the neighborhoods of Southern Hills on San Bruno Mountain: “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.” Reynolds later released her version on her 1967 Columbia Records album Malvina Reynolds Sings the Truth, and it can also be found on the Smithsonian Folkways Records 2000 CD re-issue of Ear to the Ground. However, Pete Seeger’s 1963 rendition of the song is known internationally, and it reached No. 70 in the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1964, his sole charting single. Also a political activist, Seeger was a friend of Reynolds, and, like many others in the 1960s, he used folk songs as a medium for social protest. The effectiveness of the satire was attested to by a university professor quoted in 1964 in Time magazine as saying, “I’ve been lecturing my classes about middle-class conformity for a whole semester. Here’s a song that says it all in 1+1⁄2 minutes;” however, according to Christopher Hitchens, satirist Tom Lehrer described “Little Boxes” as “the most sanctimonious song ever written”. Historian Nell Irvin Painter points out that the conformity described in “Little Boxes” was not entirely a bad thing, indicative as it was of “a process of going to university to be doctors and lawyers and business executives” who “came out all the same” and then lived in “nice, new neighborhoods with good new schools. … Suburbia may be monotone, but it was a sameness to be striven toward.”
The term “ticky-tacky” became a catchphrase during the 1960s, attesting to the song’s popularity.