Mary, Paul & Grace

Originally posted February 5, 2009

I found an interesting video of Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were The Days” at YouTube this morning. The person who posted it, richpat, writes:

The opening black and white film is from 1968 and the remaining film is from around 1982.

This song sung by Mary Hopkin called ‘Those Were The Days’ is not translated from the song ‘Дорогой длинною’ [or] ‘Dorogo Dlinnoyu.’

The song ‘Dorogoy Dlinnoyu (Along a long road)’ was written in the 1920’s by ‘Boris Fomin’ (music) and ‘Konstantin Podrevsky’ (lyrics). An American called Gene Raskin in the early 60’s wrote the lyrics ‘Those Were The Days’ and put them to Fomin’s music. The words have no similarity whatsoever with Podrevsky’s.
“For more info on Mary and this song visit my website at http://www.maryhopkin.net .

Note: Embedding has been disabled on richpat’s video since the original blog post, so I’ve found another video of the tune to place here. Note added December 21, 2011.

Here’s a video put together by YouTube user macca09 that combines Paul McCartney’s original demo of “Goodbye” (a 1968 recording that I don’t know that I’ve ever heard before) with footage of McCartney and of McCartney working with Hopkin in the studio:

Video deleted.

I couldn’t find a performance video of “Mastermind” by Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, but I did find an acoustic performance from June 14, 2007, of “Stop The Bus.” The performance took place in Studio M at WMMM (105.5) in Madison, Wisconsin.

Tomorrow, I think we’ll dig back in to the charts for this week in 1971, see what gems we can find in the lower reaches of the Billboard Hot 100.

Tags: Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, Mary Hopkin, Paul McCartney