“If I Had a Hammer” was originally written by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays in 1949. It gained popularity in 1962 when it was covered by Peter, Paul, and Mary, becoming their first big hit. It reached No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It also won Grammy awards for Best Folk Recording and Best Performance by a Vocal Group.
In Songwriters On Songwriting: Revised And Expanded, Seeger said, “The way I sing it now, what I often do is joke with an audience. I point out that you can sing it the way I wrote it or the way Peter, Paul and Mary rewrote it or half a dozen other ways, and they all harmonize with each other. I say, ‘This is a good moral for the world.’ As a matter of fact, I’m convinced that musicians have got a more important role to play in putting a world together than they’re usually given credit for. Because musicians can teach the politicians: Not everybody has to sing the melody.”
“If I Had a Hammer” was written as a protest song, with the hammer meant to symbolize fighting injustice and promoting love. As Peter Yarrow told Performing Songwriter, “It is a song of empowerment, and songs that empower with the sense of elasticity so they can relate to the world as it evolves also will remain with us.”
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He continued, “Today’s music, generally, the content is very superficial. Whereas when you looked at the songs that were sung then, they became the soundtrack of the changing consciousness of the nation, to one that aspired to freedom and equality and to the residual realities of slavery and the inequities suffered by African Americans in our country, and it became the music that in many ways consolidated the hearts and spirits of people in the movement, like the anti-war movement, the women’s movement, the anti-apartheid movement, the environment.”
He added, “That’s why it was so important. If you went to the Civil Rights March of ’63, you would have heard Peter, Paul and Mary singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘If I Had a Hammer.’ You would have heard Bobby Dylan sing, and Joan Baez.”
Peter, Paul, and Mary broke up in 1970 to pursue solo careers, but they later reunited. Some of the band’s biggest hits include “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” “Puff (The Magic Dragon),” “500 Miles,” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
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