Re: "Those were the days" (recordings, etc.)

[Robert Cohen <rlcm17...>]

First, I'm grateful to Bob Rothstein for his extensive information about 
"Those Were the Days"--it confirms and amplifies the lesser data I had--and 
am only puzzled how, if its music can so clearly be attributed to Boris 
Fomin (which was also my information), it appeared in the Gypsy/maybe 
klezmer repertoire, if I read some other posts correctly, decades before he 
wrote it!  Am I not following something--or is there some inconsistency in 
the information that's been shared with us?

Theodore Bikel and Geula Gill recorded the song in Russian, btw, in their 
Elektra FOLK SONGS FROM JUST ABOUT EVERYWHERE album (a description which 
seems to apply to this song individually as well as to the contents of the 
LP collectively ...).  And I have a recording of the song in English by 
Bikel with "Gene and Francesca," a duo from Revival days; the Gene was Gene 
Raskin, who wrote the English words to a melody he said he heard his mother 
sing to him as a child (though he claimed to have varied it some).

According to Oscar Brand, who was friendly with Raskin, the Mary Hopkin 
version--from which, of course, the world really learned the song--came 
about through mega-star intervention--which one could infer, perhaps, from 
looking at the label of the 45.  He told me that Paul McCartney heard the 
Limeliters singing the song at the Blue Angel in London and was interested 
in recording it; instead, he decided to give it to Mary Hopkin--I don't 
remember if she was a then girl friend, or a friend friend, or the girl 
friend of a friend, whatever--to record, as the first recording on the 
Beatles' new Apple label.  And so it went.  The song, I was told, sold 8-1/2 
million (ouch!) copies in its first month.  It was life-changing for Raskin, 
who bought a house in Spain and began living there half the year or 
something.  We should all be so clever ...

By the way, if I'm reading some Google listings right, the Beatles seem to 
have recorded the song themselves, or anyway sang it live--which, of course, 
is hardly a surprise given its history.

--Robert Cohen




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