Re: Info about the song, Those were the days

[Robert A. Rothstein <rar...>]

    "Those Were the Days," with words and music ascribed to Gene Raskin,
was copyrighted by Essex Music in New York in 1968, twenty years after
Boris Ivanovich Fomin, the composer of the Russian original, died in
poverty in Moscow.  Fomin, who was born in 1900, wrote many popular
Soviet songs in the 1920s and 30s.  In the period before World War II
some 300 of his works were published, but he fell into disfavor in the
post-war period and his compositions could no longer be published.  The
song that Raskin appropriated, "Dorogoi dlinnoiu" (Along a Distant
Road), had words by Konstantin Podrevskii and was published in 1926.  It
was popularized by the great emigre singer Alexander Vertinsky, among
others.  The Russian text and an English translation can be found in
_Mass Culture in Soviet Russia_, ed. James von Geldern and Richard
Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 118.
    One source for copyright and publication information about many
songs (although not this one) is James J. Fuld's book, _The Book of
World-Famous Music: Classical, Popular and Folk_, the third edition of
which was published by Dover Publishers in New York in 1985.
            Bob Rothstein

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