Table of contents:
- You are leaving, honey
- Besame mucho
- Cucaracha
- If I did not have you
- On my word of honor and on one wing
Video: 5 foreign songs that became real hits in the USSR
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
In the USSR, they listened to more foreign melodies than many remember now. Some penetrated within the framework of the official friendship of peoples, others with foreign films (which passed a strict selection committee), others imported from business trips on records and cassettes and copied from each other.
You are leaving, honey
The musical film "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" in France was considered a bold avant-garde experiment that revealed the talent of the young Catherine Deneuve; which he, this spectator, fell in love at first sight.
After the film was shown in cinemas (giving it exclusively morning sessions), Soviet girls with sketches of coats "like Deneuve's" ran to local ateliers, and pastel colors, in which Deneuve sported on the screen, suddenly became fashionable. The girls and her hairstyle took over, and the song "You are leaving" - so far in French - was played on the radio on request.
In the seventies, a Russian version of the song appeared. The most famous was the version from Lyudmila Senchina - the most crystal voice of the USSR - and the French singer Michel Legrand. Each sang a part in the language of his country. Now this version sounded on the radio and at dances.
Besame mucho
Typically, the title of this song ("Kiss me a lot") is not translated when the song is sung in other languages or announced. It was written by a Mexican teenage girl Consuelo Velazquez, who later became a famous pianist and composer in the country, author of many songs for various Mexican films.
When the film "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" was taken to the United States for the sake of being presented at the Oscar, Velasquez met with the director of the film Menshov and made a remark to him: in the film, in the episode that represented the fifties in the USSR, her song sounded. But did the Soviet Union know her then? Menshov explained that they not only knew - she was incredibly popular. Velasquez did not say anything to the director about the fact that the song was used without permission and without royalties to the author - she understood that in the USSR everything was not so simple.
In the late seventies, Consuelo had a chance to make sure of the popularity of his song among the Soviet listener. The Mexican was invited to the jury of the Tchaikovsky Competition, to judge the singers. To her amazement, at some point, Besame was announced as … a Cuban folk song. After the competition, Velasquez delicately told the Minister of Culture of the USSR that the song was rather Mexican … And it has an author. She, Consuelo Velazquez. The minister could not find an answer.
Cucaracha
Another Mexican song, only now a folk song, according to legend, came to the USSR before the war on the records of the Americans who worked in the Union. She was so popular that the hero of one of the Soviet dramas, a Georgian policeman, bears just such a nickname - Cucaracha, and none of the audience wonders where such a nickname could have come from - everyone knew the song!
The original song has many versions or verses (when these versions are combined into one song), telling about why today a certain cockroach (this is how the word “kukaracha” is translated) cannot walk. Either he lacks legs, then he did not get to smoke … The verses could be sung just like that, but more often they were filled with topical allusions to the politicians of Mexico.
The song was not translated into Russian, but based on its motives, several different pop songs were written, where the word "kukaracha" is repeated with the obligatory decoding that it is a cockroach. The most famous song is considered to be written and performed by the young Irina Bogushevskaya, with the words:
The other day we bought a dacha, there was a suitcase at the dacha. And we got a foreign cockroach in addition. We just put on a record and start a gramophone In yellow leather boots, he jumps on the record.
If I did not have you
In the second half of the twentieth century, French art more and more "left", so that the Soviet Ministry of Culture often treated it favorably. For example, many French films were released on screens in the USSR, and preference was given to social dramas and comedies, like the famous "Toys" with Pierre Richard, where a large businessman was used to buying and selling everything and everyone so much that he bought a living person for his son as toys. Records were released quite freely in the USSR and some French performers, including Joe Dassin, sounded on the radio.
Few of Dassin's fans in the USSR knew that the singer was born in the USA, and his direct ancestors on his father's side were emigrants from the Russian Empire who fled from Jewish pogroms. Joe ended up in France only at the age of eleven, when his parents decided to change their permanent place of residence, and, despite the general youth style (simple jeans, which were then worn by students and young car mechanics), he was far from ordinary youth - he studied at school in Switzerland, started earning big money early. The style was largely due to the fact that he decided to start his singing career, performing in a cafe on the student campus and later focused largely on the student audience.
"Et si tu n'existais pas", a hit of 1976, was very popular in the USSR as a love confession song. Her words and translation were copied from notebook to notebook, the record with her was almost always put on a "slow" dance at least once during a dance evening. In the end, of course, a Soviet cover of the song appeared - under the title "If it weren't for you", it was performed by pop stars, as they say, of the second echelon.
On my word of honor and on one wing
A hit of the military forties, in the USSR it was widely known in the translation of Tatyana Sikorskaya performed by Leonid Utyosov and his daughter Edith, but everyone knew perfectly well that this was a British song - only the original could not be obtained. Fortunately, the first part in Utyosov's recording sounded in English, albeit sung by “ours”. It wasn't about the records. Officially, the song was called "Bombers", but no one called it except for the brightest line of the translation.
The song is written about a real episode of the war - Operation Gomorrah. One of the planes, nicknamed "Southern Comfort" (as the crew called it), returned to the airfield burning. He had a broken oil line, damaged nose and rudder, but the crew managed to land safely. Soon, a cheerful song was already being played on the radio in Britain and the United States, and from there ours picked it up. The translation was quite accurate, but in the words the prayer on which the plane was flying was replaced with a word of honor.
The Soviet history of aviation in the Great Patriotic War also has its own legend with a burning plane, but it is much more dramatic, about how Soviet pilot Mamkin saved children in a burning plane: Operation Star.
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