Hootenanny Singers

In 1964, they debuted on the Swedish TV programme Hylands Hörna with locally well-known Swedish poet Dan Andersson's "Jag väntar vid min mila" (translated as "I'm Waiting at the Charcoal Kiln").[2]

The band had an early hit in the song Gabrielle, based on the Russian song "May There Always Be Sunshine" by Arkady Ostrovsky. Due to a lack of international copyright agreements, songs from the Soviet Union were then considered to be in the public domain.[1] Stig Anderson and Bengt Bernhag, co-founders of the band's production company Polar Music, claimed credits for the song's arrangement and Swedish lyrics. Russian media sources would later describe this as plagiarism or theft.[3][4] After reaching number five on the Swedish charts, the band translated and recorded versions of Gabrielle in German, Finnish, Italian, Dutch, and English.[1]

They were famous for the amount of touring of the Swedish outdoor concert venues and had numerous hit singles on the Svensktoppen chart. Their biggest hit was "Omkring tiggarn från Luossa", which broke the record by spending 52 weeks on Svensktoppen between 26 November 1972 and 18 November 1973. Johan Karlberg dropped out of the band in the late 1960s to take over his father's business. Karlberg died in 1992. Hansi Schwarz was also the leader of the Västervik folk ballad festival for many years. Schwarz died in 2013. To date, Tonny Rooth and Björn Ulvaeus are the two surviving members of the original line-up of the band. Some of the tracks on the 1969 album På tre man hand were released as solo singles by Björn Ulvaeus.

• Hootenanny