Roy Clark spent most of his career making people laugh and marvel at his fingers flying across a guitar neck. But the song that meant the most to one of baseball’s greatest heroes had nothing funny about it. It was a quiet song about growing old, and Mickey Mantle wanted to hear it one last time, at his own funeral.
The picker from Virginia
Roy Linnwood Clark was born on April 14, 1933, in Meherrin, Virginia. He got his first guitar on his 14th Christmas and quickly learned to play just about anything with strings: guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin and more. In the 1950s he played in bands around Washington, D.C.
By 1960 he was opening for Wanda Jackson in Las Vegas, and his first Capitol album carried a title that summed up his reputation: The Lightning Fingers of Roy Clark. In 1963 he scored his first hit, a Top 10 recording of Bill Anderson’s “Tips of My Fingers.”
A song from Paris
The song that changed Roy’s career began far from Nashville. In September 1964, French singer Charles Aznavour released “Hier encore,” with music by Georges Garvarentz and words by Aznavour. The title means something like “only yesterday.” It is the voice of a man who suddenly realizes his youth is gone and that he wasted much of it.
The English lyrics came from Herbert Kretzmer, a writer who would later become famous for the English lyrics of the musical Les Misérables. His version, “Yesterday, When I Was Young,” kept the song’s honesty: the reckless nights, the dreams left unfinished, and the regret of feeling old before your time.
A different side of Roy Clark
Roy recorded the song in January 1969, and it was released as a single that May. The timing was remarkable. That same summer, he began co-hosting a new country variety show with Buck Owens called Hee Haw, the role that would make him a household name as the show’s “pickin’ and grinnin'” star for nearly a quarter century.
Audiences who knew Roy as a cut-up were surprised by how much feeling he put into a serious ballad. The record reached No. 9 on Billboard’s country chart, No. 6 on the easy listening chart and No. 2 on the Canadian country chart. It also climbed to No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100, the only Top 40 pop hit of his career.
Looking back in his 1994 autobiography, My Life in Spite of Myself, Roy wrote that the song had opened people’s eyes to what he could do, and to how far country music could reach. He sang it on The Muppet Show in 1978 and for audiences for the rest of his life.
He was not the only one drawn to it. According to Billboard, more than 90 versions of the song had been recorded by 1972, and Aznavour himself had a European hit with his own English version in 1970.
A promise to the Mick
Among Roy Clark’s biggest fans was Mickey Mantle, the New York Yankees center fielder who had been the golden boy of baseball in the 1950s and 1960s. The two became longtime friends.
“Yesterday, When I Was Young” moved Mantle to tears. For years, he made Roy promise that he would sing it at his memorial service when the time came.
Mickey Mantle died in August 1995, at the age of 63. At his funeral, Roy Clark sang the song, just as he had promised, for a room full of family, teammates and friends saying goodbye to one of the most famous athletes in American history.
The fall of 2018
Roy Clark went on to open one of the first celebrity theaters in Branson, Missouri, in 1983, and he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He died at home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on November 15, 2018, at age 85.
Just six weeks earlier, on October 1, 2018, Charles Aznavour had died in France at 94. In the space of a few weeks, the world lost both the man who wrote “Hier encore” and the man who carried it across the Atlantic into the hearts of American country fans, and into the farewell of a baseball legend.