Mary Hopkin sings “Those Were The Days”, 1968 live performance (video)

Youtube ^ | 5/2/2016 | Staff

[simpson96]

Hope you enjoy. Those Were the Days

[simpson96]

music *ping*

[fwdude]

Those were the days of crotch-high skirts.

[elcid1970]

Her song came out days after the Soviet army invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the “Prague Spring” of Alexander Dubcek. It was an eerie coincidence.

[left that other site]

Darogi Dalneyu

Tune totally lifted from a Russian Song.

I used to sing it in both Russian and English to the delight of elderly Russians. :-)

[BlueStateRightist]

Her version produced by Paul McCartney.

[exDemMom]

Beautiful song, translated but still sounding so Russian!

[equaviator]

Good ol’ Mary Hopkiins. She was what they used to call a “songbird”.

[katana]

Wondering how someone in her twenties back in the mid-sixties, so adorable with such classic Welsh Celtic features, would age? Wonderfully as it turned out.

[Buttons12]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtzUvkmjlmw

Here’s the Russian/English. Yana Gray sings.

[jjotto]

Not exactly “lifted” - it IS the Russian song, and understood as such, although the lyrics are not a direct translation.

[Hot Tabasco]

Thanks to Youtube, there are finally faces attached to all the old songs I use to hear. Thanks to Sirius radio too, they have every era of songs than you can choose from.

[Buttons12]

If I’m not mistaken it was sung in Brothers Karamazov, the version with Yul Brynner and Claire Bloom?
Only watched it once...while being spoonfed Dostoyevsky. Did not like. :(

[left that other site]

Well, that’s why I sang it in both languages! LOL! :-)

[left that other site]

Cool! Thanks.

[elcid1970]

If it wasn’t a memorial to Prague ‘68, it sounded like one:

“We’d lead the life we choose, we’d fight and never lose...”

[Fiji Hill]

The original version, from the Soviet Union:

Dorogoi Dlinnoyu (by the long road)--Alexander Vertinskii (1926)

[relictele]

I believe she was one of the first, if not the first, signed to Apple Records after its formation by the Beatles.

One of those songs that is unrelentingly sad but all the more beautiful for it.

The Ventures did an excellent instrumental (natch) cover on their 10th Anniversary Album which also contained numerous others from 1968 - it seemed to have been a banner year for music.

[BenLurkin]

The folk equivalent of “It’s a Small World”

[Capt. Tom]

Thanks for posting this.

I like Mary Hopkin's version better than the Russian version because all of us aging English speakers can relate better to her version.

If you are a Russian, that original Russian version should have a lot of meaning and be more popular with them. -Tom