Mary Hopkin

William Hopkins was a direct descendant of Joseph Harris, one of Litchfield's pioneers, who fell a victim to the tomahawk on Harris Plains in 1723.

He had married Mary Hopkins of West Hartford, and lived just below the Symington cottage.

His daughter Abigail married a cousin, Asa Hopkins, and their son Harris married Margaret Peck, sister of Paul Peck, the mighty hunter, and became the father of William Hopkins of the spinning wheel.

William was a clever mechanic, and made this wheel to suit Nicey's particular fancy.

Did I give you enough hints? Well, I'll reveal the song now.

Song number 1521, and the best song in this set is Welsh-born Mary Hopkin and Those Were the Days.

Those were the days, my friend.

We thought they'd never end.

We'd fight and never lose for we were young and sure

The song is set to a Russian romance song called Dorogoy Dlinnoyu, a Soviet composer from the 1920s, and it went all the way up to number two, kept out of the top spot, ironically, by The Beatles and Hey Jude.

From November 2nd, 1968 through November 16th, 1968, that was Those Were the Days, Mary Hopkin, song number 1521 on Billboard's Top 3000 Songs of All Time.

And that will do it, another wonderful set of 20 songs.

I tend to like the kind of singers where you can tell in a couple of bars who it is.

And even the brand new people we signed, James Taylor, Mary Hopkin, they satisfy that criterion.

Mary Hopkin had a totally distinctive voice and a wonderful voice, that beautiful Welsh sound.

And when I heard James, every category, he excelled in, you know, songwriting, guitar playing, singing, soulful singing.

He looked like a folk singer, you know, but he didn't sing like Woody Guthrie.

deliciousness.

Oh, you could be Mary Hopkin and gnocchi, gnocchi, who's there? Jane Holmes.

Oh, that was Liv Mason.

Oh, Liv Mason.

Maybe they'd had a few pints of 6X.

Mary Hopkins fell in love with one.

Do you remember that?

She rode a white swan, did

But, you

know, there was another song that the Beatles wrote that was super popular for, you know, they were friendly with a lot of female British pop stars at the time.

So McCartney also wrote Those Were the Days for Mary Hopkins.

Remember that? Yes,

absolutely.

It was like a theme of Malta.

I really thought for a long time that it was something local and unheard of until I realized those were the days, which was a Welsh singer, I guess, Mary Hopkin.

But I thought for the longest time that it was just something.

It sounds like something out of Malta.

That was one of the greatest ones to us.

The people we'd ended up signing tended to be friends and family already, like Jackie Lomax or something, or someone like Mary Hopkin who won a talent contest.

But the actual tapes we get, unsolicited tapes people send in, are surprisingly disappointing.

Was that a particularly challenging job to get the boys in the band to focus on the work, or did they give you complete creative freedom there? A