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| Natural habitat... |
The Hit
Quite a few things came on either side of it - most of them meaning more to Roy Clark’s overall arc of considerable fame - but he charted biggest with 1969’s, “Yesterday When I Was Young.” A nostalgic tune about the fleeting promise of youth, even the music sounds borrowed from an earlier (and stodgier) time; think a Lawrence Welk take on country. The music actually works against the theme, because it tells the familiar tale of youth misspent, living fast, dying young, and so on. It packs all the verve of looking back from one’s mid-70s…which is suitable…
It was a favorite of the infamously hard-living baseball legend, Mickey Mantle, who loved it enough to ask Clark to request it his funeral.
The Rest of the Story
With Clark, the rest of the story is the story. Even when he talks about his more famous songs during a 2015 interview with the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority for its A Conversation with…[Roy Clark] series, “Yesterday When I Was Young” doesn’t sound any more or less meaningful than, say, “The Tip of My Fingers” or “Malaguena.” In fact, his comments on the latter give a clearer impression on Clark’s career: he used to talk over the song when he played it, pausing here and there to kid with the audience, until the day a stranger from the audience walked up, told him that he plays it beautifully and that his chatter took away from that. The Mantle connection clearly affected him, though, and Clark later recalled how nice it felt to receive a note from the original artist, Charles Aznavour (French; here’s the original), letting him know that he nailed his translated cover.
The greater portion of anyone who finds this post surely knows Clark from the same place I do: Hee Haw, the long-running, (later) Nashville-based variety show that was originally pitched as a summertime replacement program as Laff-In for the country crowd. The original episode and all the subsequent “replacement programs” rated high enough for CBS to pick up the show for, oh, 18 seasons, and that gets to something else about Clark: thanks to his work on The Beverly Hillbillies and a couple other daytime shows, he was hired to pair with Buck Owens on the grounds that Owens “came from music” while Clark “came from TV,” of which, yes and no.
Quite a few things came on either side of it - most of them meaning more to Roy Clark’s overall arc of considerable fame - but he charted biggest with 1969’s, “Yesterday When I Was Young.” A nostalgic tune about the fleeting promise of youth, even the music sounds borrowed from an earlier (and stodgier) time; think a Lawrence Welk take on country. The music actually works against the theme, because it tells the familiar tale of youth misspent, living fast, dying young, and so on. It packs all the verve of looking back from one’s mid-70s…which is suitable…
It was a favorite of the infamously hard-living baseball legend, Mickey Mantle, who loved it enough to ask Clark to request it his funeral.
The Rest of the Story
With Clark, the rest of the story is the story. Even when he talks about his more famous songs during a 2015 interview with the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority for its A Conversation with…[Roy Clark] series, “Yesterday When I Was Young” doesn’t sound any more or less meaningful than, say, “The Tip of My Fingers” or “Malaguena.” In fact, his comments on the latter give a clearer impression on Clark’s career: he used to talk over the song when he played it, pausing here and there to kid with the audience, until the day a stranger from the audience walked up, told him that he plays it beautifully and that his chatter took away from that. The Mantle connection clearly affected him, though, and Clark later recalled how nice it felt to receive a note from the original artist, Charles Aznavour (French; here’s the original), letting him know that he nailed his translated cover.
The greater portion of anyone who finds this post surely knows Clark from the same place I do: Hee Haw, the long-running, (later) Nashville-based variety show that was originally pitched as a summertime replacement program as Laff-In for the country crowd. The original episode and all the subsequent “replacement programs” rated high enough for CBS to pick up the show for, oh, 18 seasons, and that gets to something else about Clark: thanks to his work on The Beverly Hillbillies and a couple other daytime shows, he was hired to pair with Buck Owens on the grounds that Owens “came from music” while Clark “came from TV,” of which, yes and no.
