The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #123476   Message #2718798
Posted By: Emma B
08-Sep-09 - 08:20 AM
Thread Name: Do you like 'Little Boxes'?
Subject: RE: Do you like 'Little Boxes'?
Malvina Reynolds's song "Little Boxes," made its debut in 1962.
It ridiculed the architecture of Westlake Daly City Califonia and gave us the expression ticky-tacky.

Nancy Reynolds, daughter of Malvina Reynolds, explains: quoted at wiki

"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"

Tom Lehrer (a hero of mine) desribed it as "the most sanctimonious song ever written," but this criticism would be totally buried by later developments in the late 60s, when removal to the suburbs became a polite synonym for "white flight"