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Old Polish Tango: Mieczysław Fogg - Pozdrowienie od gór (Greetings From the Mountains) 1946

4,607 views · Published 13 January 2017 · 3:32 · Indexed 25 September 2026

Channel: 240252 · 2017 · Music

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Mieczysław Fogg & Orkiestra Fogg Record pod dyr. W. Kabalewskiego – Pozdrowienia od gór [Greetings From the Mountains] Tango (Krasiński – Żytomierski), Fogg-Record 1946 (Polish)

NOTE: This tango is one of the first great hits in post-war Poland.  Composed in 1946 by the renowned prewar pop-hits composer Zygmunt Karasiński (who in prewar Warsaw was also a notable saxophonist, dance-band leader and pioneer of jazz in Poland) it immediately became an immense hit and was also recorded by other artists.  After 1945, like the rest of the Eastern and Central Europe, Poland fell under the dominance of Stalinist Russia—and the music which was preferred by the Soviet propagandists in the conquered colonies, were folk rhythm, without syncopation, or army marching bands. The process of political and cultural oppression intensified after 1949 and the prewar “burgeois” dance music especially jazz or swing, were then hardly tolerated. Yet in first postwar years, the society in Poland still deluded itself that prewar Poland would be recreated from the ruins, and therefore those early compositions are strongly marked with all the features of the prewar dance music. Most of them therefore resemble old hits from he 1930s, just as they used to be arranged and  performed in elegant night clubs like Adria or played on the air. This tango is a good example of such nostalgia, therefore – and since theme of the lyrics is a memory of old love affair in a mountain spa – I composed the slideshow from vintage photographs of the most trendy Polish prewar winter sports resort: Zakopane.  It is sung by Mieczysław Fogg – the “king of Polish song” and it was recorded in his own recording atelier Fogg-Records, which had been arranged in 1945 in his private apartment in a ruined postwar Warsaw, and remained active until 1950 (when it was “nationalized”, sharing the fate of all Polish privately owned enterprises).

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