Nadia Comaneci at the 1976 Olympics (photo from Wikipedia)
“Nadia’s Theme” is a piece of music composed by Barry De Vorzon and Perry Botkin Jr. in 1971. It became associated with Olympic gymnast Nadia Comaneci during and after the 1976 Summer Olympics. The composition has been used as the theme music to the American television soap opera The Young and the Restless intermittently since the series debuted in 1973. This piece is also used regularly by Steve Wright presenter on BBC Radio 2 Sunday Love songs as a backing bed.
De Vorzon and Botkin Jr. composed this piece of music, originally titled “Cotton’s Dream”, as incidental music for the 1971 theatrical film Bless the Beasts and Children. The instrumental version was commercially released on that film’s soundtrack album on A&M Records. The soundtrack also included “Lost”, a song set to this melody, performed by Renée Armand.
Botkin Jr. later composed a rearranged version of the instrumental theme for the American TV soap opera The Young and the Restless, which debuted on March 26, 1973, on the CBS television network. Although a soundtrack album for the TV series was released by P.I.P. Records in 1974, the LP only contained a cover version by easy listening group Sounds of Sunshine, rather than the original recording by De Vorzon and Botkin.
Association with Nadia Comaneci
In late July or early August 1976, ABC’s sports anthology program Wide World of Sports produced a montage of Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci’s routines during the 1976 Summer Olympics and used “Cotton’s Dream” as the background music. It was this American television montage that cemented the association of the tune with Comaneci in the public mind.
(However, Comaneci herself never performed her floor exercises using this piece of music. She used a piano arrangement of a medley of the songs “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” and “Jump in the Line”.)
1976 releases
Viewer inquiries about the music from the Wide World of Sports montage prompted a commercial release of the 1971 version of the song as a single through A&M Records on August 28, 1976. This recording was identical to “Cotton’s Dream,” with a repeat from the bridge to the end edited in to lengthen the piece. The single was titled “Nadia’s Theme” and was a commercial success, charting for 22 weeks and peaking at #8 in the Billboard Hot 100 on the week ending December 11, 1976. A&M Records failed to credit De Vorzon as the co-writer on the first pressings of the single. He successfully sued the record label for $241,000.
In October 1976, as the De Vorzon & Botkin version on A&M climbed the charts, P.I.P. Records released a single containing the Sounds of Sunshine’s vocal and instrumental versions under the title “Nadia’s Theme”. The label also re-released the 1974 soundtrack LP, now stickered to say it contained “Nadia’s Theme”, although it still only contained the cover version. That same month, Barry De Vorzon capitalized on the success of the song by releasing it on his first album, Nadia’s Theme. Soon after, Sounds of Sunshine released their own Nadia’s Theme album.
On November 23, 1976, CBS further entrenched the song’s association with Comaneci by using the melody in its broadcast of “Nadia—From Romania with Love”, a one-hour TV special hosted by Flip Wilson, co-produced by CBS and Romanian television. The De Vorzon & Botkin version of the song was not released on CD until Eric Records included it on the 2003 compilation Hard to Find Orchestral Instrumentals II. An extract from the tune is used regularly as a jingle by BBC Radio 2 disk jockey Steve Wright on his Steve Wright’s Sunday Love Songs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadia’s_Theme