He was a singer-songwriter born Eugene Raskin in New York City as well as being an architect and author, who studied architecture and was an adjunct professor at Columbia University and published three books on the subject.
He wrote the play One’s a Crowd in 1949 followed by Amata.
In the early 1960s he and his wife were the duo Geno and Francesca and they regularly played the Greenwich folk clubs and released an album in 1962. The album included “Those Were The Days” which he had adapted from a Russian/Ukranian folk melody known as “Dorogoj Dlinnoyu”. This was later to become a No. 1 for Mary Hopkin which she recorded in 5 other languages, including Hebrew, and sold eight million copies worldwide.
He died in New York on 7th June 2004 aged 95.
Chet Atkins recordings
Those Were the Days (Gene Raskin)
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