French Pop History

  In any hypothetical search for the world's most unlikely pop star, the name of S œ ur Sourire would almost certainly rank highly on any list. A Dominican nun from Belgium, singing religious songs accompanied only by her own acoustic guitar was nobody's idea of a hit parade hero and yet at the end of 1963, under the anglicised nom de guerre  The Singing Nun, she sat squarely atop both the singles and the albums chart in Billboard , the best selling singer in the whole U.S.A. Her rise from the convent to The Ed Sullivan Show  was a truly strange story but sadly the aftermath was less happy and the sad tale of her rise and fall is as cautionary a tale about the effects  of fame as any.  Born in  Belgium in 1933, Jeanne-Paule Marie Deckers was raised in the Catholic faith and worked as a teacher between 1954 and 1959 before deciding to dedicate her life to God, entering a Dominican convent in Waterloo in September 1959, adopting the name S œ ur Luc Gabr...

This post has its origin in an article I wrote for another site, but once I'd finished it, I realised that it didn't fit the needs of the site in question. Still, no point in wasting some good research... and it does kind of fit here, so with a bit of reworking, here it is... Inspiration can come from the strangest places. On a flight from Nice to Paris, singer and songwriter Gilbert Bécaud met the German actress Elga Andersen, who was distraught over the breakup of a relationship the night before. (Some folk dispute this, and say that she had just repaired that relationship, although that doesn't make sense in terms of what followed - anyway, as the man said in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend...".) To return to the story... as B écaud lent a sympathetic ear, Andersen poured out her heart.  "What now?" she cried, "What will happen to me now?". Bécaud didn't write lyrics but he knew a hook whe...

  Christmas, 1961. The rock 'n' roll wave that had finally broken over France the previous year had gone from strength to strength and the onset of twist-mania at the end of the year had helped to cement its place in the French musical firmament - even parents were happy to get out on the dancefloor to do the twist. The yé-yé explosion was just around the corner. Everywhere, it seemed that the new teenage music was in the ascendant. Everywhere except, so far, the world of Christmas music. Christmas in France was synonymous with Tino Rossi, a star since the thirties whose 1946 festival offering "Petit Papa Noël" had been a hit not just that year but every year since, making the transition from 78 to EP without even pausing for breath. The biggest commercial success of Rossi's career and the biggest selling French record ever, it was (and is) to the French what Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" was (and is) to Americans - inescapable, ever-present and in...

  As soon as cinema began the shift from silent movies to "the talkies",  music and song became part of the staple cinematic diet. From the early jukebox musicals to the extravaganzas of the golden age of the Hollywood musical, singers (and musicians) flocked to film studios to become singer-actors, forging dual careers that kept them in constant work, on film sets, stages and studios, for many a long year. There would also be a slow but steady trickle of actors making the same journey in the other direction, drifiting into recording studios in a (sometimes successful) attempt to forge a parallel singing career. This was (and is) common enough in America, but it was really in France that this tradition truly established itself. The trend began, as one might expect, in the thirties. Tino Rossi made the jump from chanson  and operetta to cinema in Marinella , with its deathless title track generating one of his biggest hits. However, Rossi had made the journey in the tradit...

  One of the unforseen joys of researching my book was stumbling across the original versions of songs that I had known for years without ever realising that they owed their start to French singers, songwriters and musicians. This week's post highlights a handful of French songs that became international pop classics... Everyone knows Little Peggy March's 1963 American chart topper, "I WIll Follow Him", right? A monster hit at the height of the "girl group" era. Or maybe, depending on where you grew up, you might know the version by Rosemary Clooney, or perhaps by Dee Dee Sharp, or even the disco version by Claudja Barry. But how many people know it started life as an intsrumental called "Chariot", penned by two behemoths of French easy listening, bandleaders Paul Mauriat and Franck Pourcel and first recorded by Pourcel's orchestra in 1962? Or that the first vocal version was in French, with lyrics by Jacques Plante? Yep. It's a yé-yé  clas...

When Édith Piaf died in 1963, aged only 47, she left a huge hole at the heart of the French music industry. The previous three years had seen the chanson gradually eclipsed by the oncoming horde of  yé-yé  singers, at least as far as the media were concerned, although there would always be room on the airwaves and in the country's leading music halls and theatres for the stars of a more traditional form of French popular music. Piaf had been in ill health for several years but her sudden passing was still a shock that left the country reeling. Forty thousand people turned up to attend her burial in P ère Lachaise; many thousands more flocked to the shops to pick up one of her many classic recordings. Piaf may, to paraphrase her most famous song, have had nothing to regret, but her fellow citizens very much regretted that she was no longer alongside them. Perhaps inevitably, Piaf's departure from the stage engendered any amount of debate as to who might possibly repla...