FWIW…
Heh. Me, too. 
I was born in '61, and my sister and I (she was two years my senior) had a record collection we shared. I think this was one of the earliest 45’s we bought.
Actually, my kids know this song, too, because, while my middle daughter’s name isn’t Ariel, this is the closest a hit song has ever come to featuring her real name. So I used to sing it to her when she was a baby, and played it for her as she got older.
This was the soundtrack to the summer of my 12th year. It was on the radio constantly in Kansas City.
I’ve mentioned it here before but never gotten much response, so I’ll say Hi…
Thanks for reviving my memory, Argent. I like “Ariel”, but I remember him better for “Lucky Stars”, which may be as schmaltzy as hell, but never fails to tug on a heartstring when I hear it.
“And we can thank our lucky stars, that we’re not as smart as we like to think we are.”
OK, I speak for myself, but you get the sentiment. 
Yes! That was cribbed from this anti-drug film from the 1967.
The summer that this was a hit, my sister, best friend, and I made some effort to learn all the lyrics so that when we went on a long car trip (I think it was to an amusement park), we would be able to sing along when it came up on the radio.
Only, it never did come up on the radio during that car trip, nor have I ever heard it again in the ~35 years since. 
But I think I can still remember most of the lyrics. I sing them sometimes.
I know it because I listened to WBAI.
CMC fnord!
The version at the OP’s link has both “young girl” and “Jewish girl” in it at different points in the song. My guess is it has always been that way, and people are just remembering different bits.
I think that is very unlikely. Van Morrison grew up in Northern Ireland in the 1950s. There would have been precious few brown skinned girls about. (Clearly the song is about remembering a time when both the singer and the girl were quite young.) Besides, “skinned” does not scan right. It would sound horrible.
Also, in Britain, interracial relationships were not the sort of hot button issue, at the time the record came out, that they were in America. (And I don’t think Van is the sort of guy who would ever alter a lyric to please a censor, anyway.)
Again, are you sure you are not just mixing up different parts of the song? “Makin’ love in the green grass behind the stadium” and “Laughin’ and a-runnin’ hey hey” are both in it.
Come to that, I am inclined to think that “Makin’ love in the green grass” may not even be intended to refer to actual sexual intercourse, and certainly many people at the time would not have assumed that it must do so. Even if it was intended to mean that, plenty of much more explicit references to sex got past the censors in that period.
My bad. Rico called it correctly in Post 20. “She was a Jewish girl” was substituted with “Her name was Ariel.”
Ahh, Ariel! She forgot to tell me that she didn’t eat meat.
I think that would be more likely Bill Medley’s Brown Eyed Woman, although the point of that song could hardly have been more straightforward. But “skinned” would have STILL sounded horrible.
Just possibly she eats * braiiiinnns *.
I thought (hoped) we had agreed not to do that any more. 
I discovered “Ariel” through reruns of the old American Top 40 that are played Sunday mornings on the local oldies radio station. There are quite a few minor hits that don’t get much in the way of oldies radio rotation, and this is certainly one that deserves a listen.
As I said in another thread, that’s basically a subset of the posting “First!” mentality (IMO).
Well, for starters, the song was not considered so sweet when it was released in 1967. Radio stations refused to play a song that moved from the implied (“Down in the hollow, Playin’ a new game . . . Our hearts a thumpin’”) to the explicit (“Making love in the green grass, Behind the stadium with you”). So Morrison’s producers prepared a sanitized version for radio play. That song that repeated an earlier line and had his young lovers “laughin’ and a-runnin’, hey hey” behind the stadium (as though we couldn’t figure out what they were really doing).
When Morrison first wrote the song, he called it "Brown Skinned Girl." As John Collis recounts in his book Van Morrison: Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, Morrison later explained, “it was a kind of Jamaican song. Calypso” (page 81). This would have been a hot topic, and it would have made a little premarital involvement behind the stadium look tame. In 1967, sixteen states (the South plus Delaware) had laws prohibiting interracial marriage.
Not when someone give me a straight line like that.
First of all, if that is really true (I am not convinced), it is a damn good thing he changed it because, as I said, “skinned” would have sounded awful. If if there really was such a change, I am sure it was for that reason. It is on the level of the original lyric for McCartney’s “Yesterday”, being “Scrambled eggs”: for purely artistic reasons, it was never going to be the final lyric. (Also, if there is indeed any calypso influence on the song, it is not very obvious, and calypso music is Trinidadian, not Jamaican.)
Secondly, the fact that interracial sex/marriage was a hot button issue in America at the time is beside the point, because it was not a hot button issue in Britain or Ireland, and Van is British/Irish. The fact that they even mention this makes me think that that site is unreliable: they don’t have the brains to understand that the rest of the world does not live and think according to America’s particular cultural hangups. Yes, if it had (ugh!) been “brown skinned” the record company might not have released it as a single in the States, but no way do I believe that someone as famously pig-headed as Morrison would have changed the song itself for such a reason.
I do not deny that it is possible that (without his permission, I am sure) the record company might have edited the track to remove “makin’ love in the green grass” from some versions of the single, but it also still seems quite possible to me that the story just arises from different lines of the song having got confused in some person’s memory. It still seems daft to me, though, in an era when “making love” did not always even mean sex, and when, in famously sexually uptight Britain, much more explicitly sexual stuff, such as “Je t’aime… moi non plus” could top the charts and receive frequent plays on the BBC. (You don’t have to understand a word of French to know it that it is about, indeed, it is virtually simulating, sex.)