Singing Poets

Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece (1945-1975)

Dimitris Papanikolaou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351196178
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Between 1945 and 1975, in both France and Greece, literature provided the aesthetic criteria, cultural prestige and institutional basis for what aspired to be a higher form of popular song and the authentic representative of a national popular music. Published poems were set to popular music, while critical discourse celebrated some songwriters not only for being 'as good as poets' but for being 'singing poets' in their own right. This challenging and stimulating study is the first to chart the parallel cultural processes in the two countries from a comparative perspective. Bringing together cultural studies with literary criticism, it offers new angles on the work of Georges Brassens, Leo Ferre, Jacques Brel, Mikis Theodorakis, Manos Hadjidakis and Dionysis Savvopoulos."

Chapter 1
Poetry and the Songs

The Genre of Auteurs-Compositeurs-Interprètes and its Impact on French Popular Music in the 1950s and 1960s

Poetry and the System of French Song

In the last few decades, a common thread has run though the obituaries of best-known French-language singer-songwriters: the use of the word ‘poetry’ define their art and the word ‘poet’ to characterize them. ‘Trenet the poet has go mourned the front-page headline of the da Le Figaro when Charles Trenet died on 20 February 2001. A similar feeling can be detected in the coverage in France of Jacques Brel’s death in 1978: ‘A poet who cut through us, as if better to discover the secret of a deformed heart’, wrote Alain Bosque in Le Monde (reprinted in Monestier 1979: 13). As for the death of Georges Brassens in 1981, this was dealt with as the passing of a national poet: ‘When death takes the poet ...’, read the t of Le Figaro (31 October 1981), and almost the same words were used in the Parisien libéré of the same date. ‘Brassens: The death of a poet’, announced Le Matin (31 October 1981). In his message the French president, François Mitterrand, followed in a similar vein: ‘One of the true poets of our time has left us. Georges Brassen knew how to keep the alliance between poetry and music at a high level and work has already become part of France’s cultural heritage’ (reprinted in Monestier and Barlatier 1982: 11). This consensus emerged, as Louis-Jean Calvet notes, ‘as if the only way to pay homage to a singer in France were to consider him a poet (Calvet 1991: 12).

The reader is struck by the sheer number and recurrence of the words ‘poet’ a ‘poetry’ in this context; they crop up in ways that combine extreme elevation genre apparently considered of low origin (these singer-songwriter as good as poets), a canonical positioning (they are our leading modern poets), and a generic description (these singers are in fact poets) all at the same time.

As I will show, this is neither coincidental nor the conspiracy of a few headlineseeking journalists and politicians. On the contrary, specific notions of ‘poetry' and the ‘poetic’ have been used as basic instruments for the construction firm genealogy of French singer-songwriters over the last fifty years, and a classification of the upper echelons of French popular music. This tenden originated in a cultural production which culminated in the 1950s, to be articula capitalized on, and canonized in publications, re-releases, and discussions in the 60s. It gave rise to a specific discourse of ‘French cahnson’ that effectively provided a powerful narrative and value system for French popular music. In the following pages I shall be looking at how this discourse was produced, promoted, and established. To guide the reader, I start with a brief and necessarily schematic historical sketch of the history of French popular music in the nineteenth and earl twentieth centuries.

Popular music in France

If popular music begins with organized entertainment in the urban centres undergoing the transformations of modernity, then a prehistory of French popular music has to be traced in the eighteenth century, with the emergence of various singing societies, especially the high-class and literary-minded caveaux and later their working-class equivalent, the goguettes. These societies met in restaurants and cafés where people gathered to drink together, sing, and often exchange satires of a personal or social nature in sung verse; songwriters and performers like Béranger (1780–1857) would become legendary in this context. In the nineteenth century, and especially in the years before the Paris Commune of 1871, the goguettes became ‘cradles of class consciousness and socialism’, forging a tradition that would see chanson ‘as a viscerally oppositional form: left-wing or even anarchist, gritty and participative, “authentic” ’ (Looseley 2003a: 13).

The ban on public meetings issued by Napoleon III in 1852 may have signalled the end of the era of the caveaux and the goguettes, but it also gave breathing space to other types of venue, the cabarets, smaller drinking places with live music, and the larger cafés-concerts, or caf’conc’ as they became known. As it became established in that period, the caf’conc’ was a place offering food and drink, with one or more singers presenting song programmes (tours de chant) in turn, often followed by other performing artists such as comedians. Audiences would be of both bourgeois and working-class origins, and the singing acts of diverse styles. caf’conc’ milieu, new types of chansonnier emerged, bawdy humour satirists in the tradition of the caveaux and the goguettes, often with a political dimension to their verses yet even more tuned in to the needs of a burgeoning entertainment industry. Those chanssonniers would eventually become more at ease with the smaller spaces outside the city centre, especially in the Paris neighbourhood of Montmartre, thus producing a more refined and literary type of song. Aristide Bruant (1851–1925) would become the unquestionable star of that period, an iconic representative of the small cabarets of the district: Le Chat Noir, Le Mirliton, Le Divan Japonais, or Les Ambassadeurs (the poster for which, by Toulouse-Lautrec, would remain the symbol of the whole era). Bruant’s style naturaliste is in direct dialogue with the chanson réaliste, the genre associated with women singers from Eugénie Buffet and Yvette Guilbert in the late nineteenth century to Damia, Fréhel, and Edith Piaf in the twentieth. Their songs on the suffering of low-class city life and the tribulations of love, which moved high-and low-class audiences alike, built one of the most solid and recognizable genres of French popular music to have survived in the twentieth century.

In the meantime, under the influence of the British music hall, larger performance spaces opened in Paris — the Folies Bergères in 1869, the Bobino in 1880. The turn of the century saw the establishment of more and bigger venues, such as the famous Moulin Rouge, where the standard programme now became the popular revue, a longer and more complex performance with elaborate costumes, settings, and acts. These music halls would welcome the French craze for jazz, the exoticism of La Revue Nègre, and music with a variety of syncopated rhythms which gave the period the name ‘Les Années swing’. The musical hybridity of the interwar years would become even more pronounced in the 1930s and would not be curtailed by the Occupation; quite the opposite: the cities would be musicall vibrant under the Germans or Vichy, a mixture of the need for escapism and ‘contestation culturelle’ (since any ‘American-style’ music was officially banned). The extraordinary performer, singer, and songwriter Charles Trenet, the defining star of this period, emerged out of its characteristic mixture of styles, the rhyth and melodic extravagance playfully named ‘style zazou’. Trenet had made his debut in 1938 on the stage of the ABC in Paris to almost immediate acclaim, and became the bridge between the France of the Front Populaire, the zazou years of the Occupation and the relative sobriety of the postwar years. In the 1960s, when critics acclaimed the modern French chanson as a literary genre, Trenet was seen as its earliest representative, a view supported by the fact that he wrote most of his material himself; this was, nonetheless, a largely retrospective move. In the completely different entertainment climate after the Liberation, small clubs and a much more intellectual environment would support the emergence of a new genre of literary song; it heralded not only a new phase in the history of French popular music, but also concepts (such as ‘auteurship’ and ‘literary song’) that were then projected back onto earlier figures.

In the postwar years French popular music underwent a significant transformation. On the surface the changes may initially have seemed small: a type of literary song emerged and along with it a number of key figures who would achieve immense popularity as singer-poets. Yet this was to have much wider implications, since it was precisely this type of literary or poetic song that evolved into a way to re-narrate the whole history of national popular music. That period, as I will show in what follows, not only presents a famous genre of French popular music; it also produces the narrative that so decisively shapes a visible image for French popular music as a distinct and hierarchized cultural space.

The artists who mostly wrote and presented their own songs and appeared on the stage of postwar Paris would soon be collectively referred Auteurs-Compositeurs-Interprètes (abbreviated as ACI).¹ It was the ACI and the critical discourses associated with their work that consolidated a new, and still powerful, narrative about French popular music — what is often referred to as the modern narrative of French chanson.

In the mirror of poetry

The external characteristics that defined the work of the Auteurs-Compositeurs-Interprètes were the singers’ tendency to present songs written by themselves and their economical use of orchestration, which was often limited to a single instrument. More internal characteristics were a stylistic consistency and intertextual build-up that gave the impression of a single person’s ‘œuvre’; allusions to an idealized im of oral poetry; and well-wrought song lyrics that carried most of the weight of the song. With the gradual creation of a ‘singing national myth’ in the ‘troubadouric' persona of Georges Brassens, and with the extension of the discussion about the ‘poetic value’ of the key figures in this genre, the ACI embodied not only a distinct and prestigious popular-music genre, but a pattern for the very concept of ‘good' popular music, and the basis for a narrative of French popular music as a cultural system.

It is quite telling that the most widely acknowledged and cited history of the modern French song, written by Lucien Rioux, started life as Vingt ans de chansons en France (Rioux 1966) and then evolved into 50 ans de chanson française (Rioux 1992). The initial twenty years were, as one might expect, the period of the emergence of the ACI as a definable group. Even in the final edition of this book, which is much more representative and covers a larger time span than before, the chapter devoted to Brassens and his peers is aptly subtitled ‘L’Époque des géants’ (‘The Time of Giants’). The ACI, or, as another book called them in 1970, ‘these singers we call poets’ (Hermelin 1970), were gradually presented as having high representatives (the triad of Brassens, Jacques Brel, and Léo Ferré), forefathers (Charles Trenet), ancestors (Béranger and Bruant), minor sui generis representatives (Félix Leclerc, Anne Sylvestre, Barbara, certainly Serge Gainsbourg), and sons and daughters (Maxime Le Forestier, Renaud). Even today, some see their belated imitators in musical genres that do not have much in common with them (such as the rapinfluenced music of MC Solaar) (Carapon 1999). The ACI, Louis-Jean Calvet concludes, were seen for the second half of the twentieth century as ‘the Rolls Royce of the French singer, the gold standard, the top notch [le haut de gamme, le top niveau]’ (Calvet 1995a: 58).

The phenomenal acclaim of the ACI, then, is directly related to a crucial conviction which guided the majority of music critics in France after 1945: that the ‘good’ French popular song had to have an uncontested literary value. Look more closely, the persistent literary appreciation of the modern French popular song seems to have been the amalgam of two complementary critical strategies: the first is to see the French chanson (as exemplified by the ACI) as the direct descendant of a literary evolution, the second to discern in those artists first emerging in the 1950s (and, retrospectively, in some of their predecessors) the survival of a tradition that goes back to the oral minstrels, a successful mutation of oral poetry (of the troubadours, of ancient storytellers, and so on) into modernity.²

The combination of these two arguments is clearly shown in the perception of the French chanson outside France. In one early example, an article published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1968, Alasdair Clayre notes how the French singer-songwriters remind us that silent reading of poetry is a comparatively neew practice, and that oral poetry — performed or sung — was once the rule. But TLS reader can rest assured that, notwithstanding the ancient roots of their orality, these singers are also as good as published poets; in short, they can write. Clayre goes on to present Brel and Brassens as ‘indispensable’ for the creation of a Europe popular song tradition:

for the standards they set, for the scope of their constructions, and above all for having grounded their song-writing in the tradition of European verse, so that whatever else they do, they can write. Then there is the chance that sometimes they will write poetry. (Clayre 1968: 104, emphasis added)

For Colin Evans, another British academic writing in 1981, ‘the French chanson is a popular form and is about fundamentals’ (Evans 1981: 11). In this context, ‘fundamentals’ means a version of the popular not so much as ‘the authentic voice of the people’, but as the ‘authentic voice of poetry’. It is implied that the origins of poetry lie in oral poetry, an argument which I prefer to term the thesis of originary orality. At a time when the death of the author is proclaimed, Colin Evans reminds his readers, one should applaud ‘a form of poetry’ which ‘remains inseparable from an author, a creator, a performer — a monument to a lost unity’ (ibid.). This framework still pertains in studies about the French song in England. In his recently published Chanson: The French Singer-Songwriter from Aristide Bruant to the Present Day, Peter Hawkins points out that ch t an ‘ son is a tradition which goes back to the Middle Ages, and probably beyond [...] although it has undergone many transformations since then’; he adds that, undoubtedly 'chanson has retained close links with its “more prestigious literary cousin”, that is, poetry’ (Hawkins 2000: 3).

Whither the poetic?

It is tempting to accept, along with the critics cited above, that the poetic value of the chanson stems directly from a long French poetic tradition. The importance accorded to authors and literary figures in modern France should also be taken into account. Literature in France still plays a central role ‘in the ongoing process of the establishment of national identity’ (Worton 1995: 192), and conversely, one could argue, any cultural product that is considered important ends up being regarded as a form of literature. It is also true that the generation of Brassens and Ferré were not the first musicians to be venerated as poets: Béranger had been admired as a poet in the early nineteenth century, and Bruant in the early twentieth; and from the time of the caveaux and the goguettes numerous literary figures had expressed their appreciation for popular-music entertainment and its art. But never before the 1950s was the mirror image of high literature used so consistently and extensively as a criterion to define and promote chanson.

One key factor for this development was the important role played in France by what Paul Yonnet has astutely analysed as ‘the French ideology of high culture (‘l’idéologie française de la grande culture’) (Yonnet 1985: esp. 195–200). In short, this is the term used to describe a cultural ideology uniting different periods of French social life and providing cultural value judgements that operate as natural. A crucial aspect of la grande culture is its close articulation with the idea of Frenchness — with the idea that it is specifically French culture that expresses true, authentic (and thus, high) culture in the best way possible, an argument that also runs in the opposite direction, ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Transliteration, References, and Translations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Poetry and the Songs: The Genre of Auteurs-Compositeurs-Interprètes and its Impact on French Popular Music in the 1950s and 1960s
• 2 Greece of the Two Composers: Popular Music as a National Institution in Greece, 1948-1963
• 3 The 1960s, the Singer-Songwriter, and his Way to A-void: Dionysis Savvopoulos and the New Challenges of Popular Music 1963-1975
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• List of Recordings
• Index