No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [1]
Despite cultural differences, comparisons to Billie Holiday and Judy Garland have some merit. Piaf’s legend appears to fit the template for successful artists who pay the price in their descent into suffering caused by drink, drugs, and, in the case of women, promiscuity. What is more, these three female vocalists, who died young after careers that were, to say the least, hectic, share an intensity, although Piaf’s origins among the “dangerous classes”—the outcasts among whom she and her acrobat father eked out a living—suggest that she had more in common with Holiday than with Garland. The French street urchin and the black American each transformed the clichés of ordinary speech into a bodily communion; their transports produced in admirers an almost ecstatic response. (From the start, however, Piaf was claimed by the masses in her country—unlike Holiday, whose style endeared her mainly to white jazz-lovers until after her death, when black audiences finally accepted her.)
Piaf began as an interpreter of la chanson réaliste, the tradition of “realistic” song-stories about the downtrodden—often prostitutes or lovelorn women whose men desert them—but soon came to represent not only the French spirit as mirrored back to her compatriots but also the allure to the larger world of this fatalistic yet resilient stance. By the 1930s, an ideology of the “little guy” was in place in the French entertainment business. Chevalier and Mistinguett, his ever-popular former lover, were the golden couple of music-halls like the Folies Bergère, whose variety shows featured these insouciant icons of je-m’en-foutisme—the “I don’t give a damn” response to adversity. Just below these venues on the show-business ladder came cabarets of varying repute, and beneath them the working-class dives that represented a promotion for a former street singer like Piaf. Her early repertoire gave audiences a certain view of society, one in which la chanson réaliste told the truth about working-class lives and piqued the curiosity of artists like Jean Cocteau, who went slumming in the poorer quarters in search of artistic vision.
Yet Piaf’s origins, while fascinating in their own right, do not explain her appeal to all levels of French society and, after World War II, to music lovers around the world. She came on the scene in 1935 with a voice that was already a powerful brass instrument. Over the next few years, when she no longer had to project to street crowds, she refined it—bringing greater subtlety to the lyrics and bringing out their meaning with her hands, which swooped majestically or fluttered like moths as she sang.
Piaf’s velvety vibrato and guttural “r”s soon became the marks of her style, whether she sang of everyday tragedies or performed the light, comic numbers that are less well known outside France. Choosing songs primarily for their lyrics, she soon performed them with the “proper French” diction she learned from her mentors, Jacques Bourgeat and Raymond Asso, who taught her to live more fully within each tune. From then on, as her musical intelligence developed, there was never a word out of place, never a false gesture even as she sang of great truths (or platitudes). Oddly, given Piaf’s start as a spitfire, she perfected an art of sobriety, one that conveyed the rawness of deeply felt emotion yet retained a high degree of vocal purity.
It is not often noted that it was Piaf’s sense of métier, the art of performance that comes with long experience, that underscored her poignant mix of vulnerability and defiance. “My song is my life,” she wrote when applying to join the French songwriters’ union. Yet the musical versions of her life that are still so completely identified with the singer were carefully selected, rehearsed,