The first time ever I heard that name
It is late 1969 or early 1970. There I was, 15 or 16 years old, having gotten home (fairly late, as a high school student) from my "porter's" job at the bowling alley, 10:30 or 11:00 PM, and it's DEFINITELY time to take a hot bath to peace out before bed, listening to the only decent commercial FM rock station in the Philly area at the time, WMMR (reception for WXPN, WXDT that later became WKDU, WRTI, and the other college stations was VERY spotty on the cheap radios of the time) and this song came on, like none other I'd ever heard. Now, unlike most of my age cohort, I was a tremendous classical fan and totally addicted to All That's Weird like Zappa, Beefheart, Pink Floyd, world music (we called it ethnic folk back then), progressive jazz (soon to morph into fusion), AND rock, yet this was a true mystery, but late on a school night, I couldn't really pursue this mystery.
There was a small orchestral group, with a whiny, but not at all unpleasant, low-pitched violin or viola motif prominent, and then a choral line in response to a contralto line the language of which I couldn't understand, but for some reason found no difficulty repeating by the third or fourth repetition (I was very good with languages when young).
"Govinduh oddee-pooroosha tom ahom bhajuhmay" (is what it sounded like, I later found the words are written to other phonetic rules than those I grew up with)
Somehow, that phrase (I could remember none of the words of the verses, as they weren't repeated, yet there was a haunting familiarity, a feel of this completely unknown language that was COMFORTABLE, somehow natural to me) stuck in my head, with no referent of meaning, other than I loved the sound of the phrase, and-THAT MELODY, the most beautifully haunting and compelling thing I'd EVER heard in my life, and have never forgotten (a few years later, that would be utterly expected, as I listened to that song every single morning for a very long time)... here is a link to the specific recording, and after being played in thousands of homes and temples every single morning, it is certainly familiar to millions- but the world population is billions, so very, very many are not.
This was posted by "George Harrison", maybe it really WAS George, as he produced the original recording so many years ago:
A year or two later, I'd heard the HARE KRSNA mantra in several different contexts that didn't particularly register on me as of impact or import, and a year or two after that, found a very young woman who would tolerate my attentions (I had no conception of how important that maha-mantra was to her, and the depth of her agenda for my future life), then we had a son and with our collection of friends and associates, slowly became enmeshed in a life which, while hemmed in by many material constraints, we strove to orient more and more around devotion to KRSNA.
Still, it took some years for the penny to drop; Govinda is KRSNA. KRSNA is Govinda (master and friend to go-mata and go-pita, all the cows).
Go here for more text of the verses: http://www.iskcondesiretree.com/page/brahma-samhita
This is only a portion of the complete Purana.