Covers
When the song was first released Rick Melbourne, a breakfast radio announcer, produced a parody version of the song, including the lyrics "God help me, she told me she was sixteen". Australian country singer John Williamson recorded a live version as "Only 19" and released it on his 1984 vinyl LP, The Smell of Gumleaves (rereleased in 1996 as a CD under the title Home Among the Gum Trees).
The song's and album's producer, Trevor Lucas, performed his version as a member of his United Kingdom-based group Fairport Convention at the 1985 Cropredy Festival. On the show Fast Forward, Gina Riley, in character as Eleanor LaGore, performed a swing version of the song.
In 2005 a hip hop version of the song (called "I was Only 19") was produced by The Herd, voted in at #18 in the 2005 Triple J Hottest 100 playlist. "I was Only 19 (The Herd version)" is credited to Schumman, Cheung, Fellows, Harrison and Kennedy. A video by Broken Yellow was directed by Brendan Doyle and produced by Navid Bahadori included actors in roles as Australian soldiers, some actual Vietnam vets, including Frankie Hunt, are also shown. The video clip can be seen at http://www.brokenyellow.com/. An audio mp3 download by Triple J's Hack has reporter Ali Benton discussing the video, interviewing Doyle, Schumann and Hunt.
This song also plays a symbolic role in the 2006 book World War Z by Max Brooks.
Read more about this topic: I Was Only Nineteen
Famous quotes containing the word covers:
“... nothing seems completely to differentiate the poor but poverty. We find no adjectives to fit them, as a whole, only those of which Want is the mother. “Miserable” covers many; “shabby” most, and I am sadly aware that, in a large majority of minds, “disagreeable” includes them all.”
—Albion Fellows Bacon (1865–1933)
“Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word.”
—Gail Hamilton (1833–1896)
“And so we ask for peace for the gods of our fathers, for the gods of our native land. It is reasonable that whatever each of us worships is really to be considered one and the same. We gaze up at the same stars, the sky covers us all, the same universe compasses us. What does it matter what practical systems we adopt in our search for the truth. Not by one avenue only can we arrive at so tremendous a secret.”
—Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (A.D. c. 340–402)