This morning I woke with Roy Clark’s version of “Yesterday When I Was Young” playing in a loop in my head, I think possibly because Pretty and I volunteered to help at a memorial tennis tournament yesterday for a good friend’s daughter whose song would be Today When I Was Young, when I was brave, when I was fierce, I died too soon in 2022 at the age of 36. As the song played over and over in my head, I began to wonder about the singer and songwriter.
Roy Clark, the singer whose version I remember best, was born in 1933 in Meherrin, Virginia and died on November 15, 2018 in Tulsa, Oklahoma six weeks following the songwriter Charles Aznavour’s death in the south of France. Clark was the son of a laborer on the railroad and in the sawmills of Virginia while Aznavour was born in Paris in 1924 to parents who had escaped the Armenian genocide. I was struck by the random coincidence of their deaths, the musical connection between two giants in their respective professions.
Two men from widely disparate origins and musical backgrounds, yet their music met in 1969 when Clark recorded “Yesterday When I Was Young” that was written and sung by Aznavour as “Hier Encore” (yesterday again) in 1964. Doreen St. Felix wrote a tribute to Aznavour in The New Yorker on October 23, 2018 while the Ken Burns Country Music Documentary that premiered in 2019 on PBS included excerpts from Clark’s biography.
“On October 1st, Charles Aznavour, the world’s last and greatest troubadour, was found dead in the bath at his home in the small village of Mouriès, in southern France. He was ninety-four. Aznavour’s career spanned nearly eighty years, at least a thousand songs, three hundred albums, dozens of tours, and many, many films. His music, animated by an earthy interest in what addles and excites the common man, had a revolutionizing impact on French pop, extending its lifetime well past its mid-century golden age, and its influence well beyond the borders of Aznavour’s nation. Logically, his death should not have been a shock. Age must do its ravishing, even to those who have acquired the sheen of the immortal.” (Doreen St. Felix)
“…The following year [1963], Roy Clark had his first hit – Bill Anderson’s “The Tips of My Fingers” – and in 1969, his song “Yesterday When I Was Young” became a hit on both the pop and country music charts. In the decades that followed, he would place more than 50 songs on the country charts, including nine Top 10s. It was also in 1969 that Roy received a call from Jim Halsey about hosting a new television show, based loosely on the hit variety show Laugh In, but swapping out youth culture for country music, rural one-liners, and blackout comedy. At its peak, Hee Haw reached 30 million viewers weekly and Clark became an ambassador for country music…” (Ken Burns)
Yesterday, when I was young the taste of life was sweet like rain upon my tongue. I teased at life as if it were a foolish game the way an evening breeze would tease a candle flame. The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned, I always built to last on weak and shifting sand. I lived by night and shunned the naked light of day and only now I see how the years have run away. Yesterday, when I was young there were so many songs that waited to be sung. So many wild pleasures that lay in store for me and so much pain my dazzled eyes refused to see. I ran so fast that time and youth at last ran out. I never stopped to think what life was all about and every conversation that I can recall concerns itself with me and nothing else at all.
Unlike the lyrics in this song, I do stop to think what life was all about, a personal luxury at the statistical life expectancy age for women in the United States of 77.28 years which is my age today. I can identify with these lyrics, with its universal themes of how the years run away, the wild pleasures mixed in with the dazzling pain, teasing at life, dreams that won’t ever be realized – all compressed into memory makers. But I had a reminder yesterday that my age is a gift, unmerited favor, grace that should be celebrated every day.
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Each of you is a part of my gift of life – I am thankful for you. Rest in peace, KK.
I'll Call It Like I See It 