Connie Francis & Bobby Darin live Jan 3rd,1960 - Mama , You Make Me Feel So Young,You're The Tops
Stereo Mixed & in Color
Connie Francis with Bobby Darin
In 1956, Bobby met Connie as a young songwriter. The pair quickly recognized a similar fire to succeed in each other. “Bobby was determined to make it before he was 25,” Connie, 87 tells Closer. “He was the smartest man I ever met. He could talk about anything — poetry, philosophy, politics, history.”
Multiple infections with rheumatic fever as a child left Bobby with a weakened heart — and an urgency to live his life to the fullest. Not long after he and Connie, who became a star in 1958 with “Who’s Sorry Now?” fell in love, he began talking marriage. “Bobby wanted to elope, but I knew my father would kill us both,” Connie says.
Bobby Darin and Connie Francis Were Dream Lovers
That hardly deterred her ardent lover. “One night, I got home and there was Bobby with packed suitcases. He got down on one knee and said, ‘OK, let’s go get ourselves married,’” she recalls. “I couldn’t out of fear of my dad.”
Connie also had practical reasons for not leaping into matrimony. Bobby would become a two-time Grammy winner and sell more than a million records, but at that time both of them were penniless. “The thought of Bobby getting a job like a regular civilian was foreign to me,” Connie admits. “I kept asking, ‘Where will we live? What will we eat?’ We used to share an egg salad sandwich from a drugstore because we didn’t have any money.”
When Connie’s father learned that Bobby had shown up at The Jackie Gleason Show, where she was scheduled to perform, he decided to end the romance. “[My father] had a pistol in his back pocket,” Connie recalls. “My manager saw it and screamed, ‘Run, Bobby, Run.’ Bobby dashed through all of the seats and escaped through the men’s bathroom window.”
In the coming days, Bobby tried to contact Connie through her manager’s office, but she refused his phone calls. “He had a delicate heart,” she explains. “I was scared something might happen to him because of the stress and my dad’s hatred toward him. My dad was obsessed when it came to me and who I could be with.”
Both Connie and Bobby would go on to other loves — but she never forgot him. “I think of him every single day and still play his music all the time,” she says. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of him.”
"Mamma" (Mama) is a popular song composed in 1940 by Cesare Andrea Bixio with Italian lyrics by Bixio Cherubini under the title "Mamma son tanto felice" (Mum, I am so happy).
The performers of this song included: Beniamino Gigli, Luciano Tajoli, Richard Tucker, Claudio Villa, Robertino Loreti, Violetta Villas, Muslim Magomayev, Luciano Pavarotti, Toto Cutugno, Andrea Bocelli, Sergio Franchi, Romina Arena, Jon Christos and Mario Frangoulis.
In 1946, the English lyrics were written by Harold Barlow and Phil Brito who had their popular recording hit the charts in May 1946 under the title of "Mama".
British singer David Whitfield also had a hit with the song, which reached number 12 in the UK Singles Chart in 1955. The British lyrics did differ from the American ones. The song was re-arranged and re-written by Geoffrey Parsons and John Turner.
The song was also recorded by Connie Francis in 1959 for her album Connie Francis Sings Italian Favorites, with her hit single released in February 1960. Arranged and conducted by Tony Osborne, the Connie Francis version of the song was a number two hit in the UK, number three in Canada, and peaked at number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
In other languages
The song in German (as well as in Dutch and in English) was recorded by Dutch child singer Heintje Simons for his album Heintje in 1967 (lyrics written by Bruno Balz).Also Heintje performed Mama in Zum Teufel mit der Penne (1968) comedy film.