Eduard Khil - General Megathread for the 24th of November 2021

Eduard Anatolyevich Khil (4 September 1934 – 4 June 2012), was a Soviet and Russian baritone singer. He was born in Smolensk, USSR. Young life was hard for Khil. During WWII his kindergarten was bombed and he was separated from his mother and evacuated to a children's home. Despite the desperate situation, Khil regularly performed in front of wounded soldiers in the nearby hospital. He was reunited with his mother in 1943 when Smolensk was liberated from Nazi Germany and in 1949 moved to Leningrad, where he enrolled in and then graduated from printing college.

After graduating from the Leningrad Conservatory, he began a career as a pop singer. He won several prizes, the most notable of which was the People's Artist of the RSFSR.

In 1976, Eduard performed a version of the song "I am very glad, as I'm finally returning back home" (Russian: Я о́чень рад, ведь я, наконе́ц, возвраща́юсь домо́й) without lyrics. The style is described by Wikipedia as a "Non-lexical vocable".

In 2009, a video recording of the performance was uploaded to Youtube and gained widespread popularity in the ensuing year. Eduard had this to say about the lyrics:

"I haven't heard anything about [the petition to have Eduard perform the song again]. It's nice, of course! Thanks for good news! There is a backstory about this song. Originally, we had lyrics written for this song but they were poor. I mean, they were good, but we couldn't publish them at that time. They contained words like these: "I'm riding my stallion on a prairie, so-and-so mustang, and my beloved Mary is thousand miles away knitting a stocking for me". Of course, we failed to publish it at that time, and we, Arkady Ostrovsky and I, decided to make it a vocalisation. But the essence remained in the title. The song is very playful – it has no lyrics, so we had to make up something so that people would listen to it, and so this was an interesting arrangement." — Eduard Khil

Mikhail Ostrovsky, the son of the original composer, said that the song's lyrics were not censored:

Nobody banned its lyrics, but my father just composed the music during the period of his disagreement with Lev Oshanin. The latter told him that the lyrics are more important in a song and that a composer is nothing without a lyricist. So Dad told him during the argument, "Well, I don't need your verses at all, I'll manage without them." — Mikhail Ostrovsky

On December 31st, 2011, Eduard Khil performed the song live again for a 2012 New Year's Russian holiday television special. Khil would pass away later in 2012, leaving behind a legacy of glorious Soviet pop music. :soviet-heart: :USSR:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Khil

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