Paris in Song

Published June 24, 2012

It’s not often I walk through the streets of Paris, humming, singing, swaying to a melody. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like to draw attention to herself in the street, but today is different. I’m walking on air, care-free, my heart full of song. No, I haven’t just fallen in love, nor have I hit the jackpot playing Loto, the French national lottery. Today, I simply stepped outside and headed to the library!

Yes, to the library. There, at an exhibit organized by the public libraries of the city of Paris, I discovered Paris en chansons, Paris in Song, one of the most joyful exhibits I’ve been to in years and readers with a computer can discover it too at www.chansons.paris.fr. And there’s no need to understand French. The range of emotions expressed in the more than four hundred recordings that make up the exhibit (out of a selection of 2,800 songs about Paris) speak the universal language of music, transcending words and borders, capable of touching hearts everywhere.

Before we enter the exhibit, those who would like to read and listen at the same time can go to the homepage of Paris en chansons. At the bottom of your screen you’ll see an orange bar for Radio Deezer, a French-based music streaming service, which, till July 29, the day the exhibit closes, will be streaming non-stop songs about Paris spanning a period of nearly five hundred years. The most ancient is “Voulez ouyr les cris de Paris,” “Hear the cries of Paris,” a song written by Clément Janequin in 1530, which provides a mouth-watering inventory of all the food and drink sold by hucksters in the city streets nearly 500 years ago.

At the other end of the timeline, one of the most recent is “Gare du Nord,” “North Station,” recorded in 2009 by Malakoff, a French rock group that grinds out a hard-rock ballad about the misery and excitement found in this Parisian train station, the busiest in Europe, the most dangerous in France.

In between, there are lots of familiar faces, voices, and songs for both the French and Americans. I listened to Cole Porter’s “I Love Paris” and heard Petula Clark sing “Hello Paris.” Everywhere, in photos, video and sound recordings, I met Maurice Chevalier, star of the 1958 MGM movie “Gigi,” where he sang “Thank heaven for little girls.” Considered a typical “French lover,” he inspired the Looney Tunes character Pepé le Pew and remains one of the best known French singers in the world. I stopped to admire a photo of the frail Edith Piaf, “the little sparrow,” weighed down by her accordion. I also listened to Yves Montand as he strolls along the boulevards of Paris, Charles Aznavour singing about why he loves Paris in May, and Brigitte Bardot celebrating “les p’tites femmes de Paris,” the elusive women of Paris who always know how to keep a man on his toes.

Many names familiar to the French may be less so to Americans, such as Juliette Greco whose 1951 rendition of “Sous le ciel de Paris,” “Under the Paris sky,” is my favorite. There’s also Barbara (1930-1997), a singer for whom “Seine” often rhymed with “peine” (Seine and pain went together). Going further back in time, three legendary figures stand out: Aristide Bruant (1851-1925), Mistinguett (1875-1956), and Josephine Baker (1906-1975).

The painter Toulouse Lautrec immortalized Aristide Bruant, the father of French popular song, who sang in the language of the streets of Paris, protesting against injustice, celebrating the life of the working class. Surely, many readers will recognize his portrait or a poster of Le Chat noir (The Black Cat), the famous Montmartre cabaret where he performed. At the exhibit, I listened to an 1889 recording of him singing one of his compositions, “A la place Maubert,” “On Maubert Square.”





Mistinguett, singer, dancer, actress, star of stage and screen, sang at Moulin Rouge and, in 1926, was the star of the opening ball of the Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro. That same year, “Ça, c’est Paris,” “That’s Paris,” the song that became her “anthem,” was composed. Performing it, she belts out that Paris is a blond who makes everybody happy. Her chief rival, Josephine Baker (1906-1975), the African-American singer who, in the 1920’s and 30’s, took Paris by storm, might have disagreed. At the Folies Bergères, she sang “Paris, Paris, Paris” and “J’ai deux amours,” “I have two loves” (France and the USA), and brought the house down.





Ernest Hemingway wrote that Paris is “A Moveable Feast.” Parisians might argue that, above all, “Paris is a song,” and every neighborhood has its own. The website of Paris en chansons provides an interactive map (carte interactive), where, district by district, decade by decade, from the 1870’s to the present, you can discover how each Parisian neighborhood was turned into song. Mine, near what were once the slaughter houses and the meat market of the city, has been immortalized in “Les joyeux bouchers,” “The Happy Butchers,” a 1954 tango whose refrain is “it’s gotta bleed, it’s gotta bleed.”

In the past, before Parisians began tuning out the world and tuning into music only they can hear through headphones plugged into electronic devices, they actually joined together in song. Paris en chansons also documents how sheet music was sold in the streets, a practice developed by Aristide Bruant who would send out singers with a bundle of his songs printed as sheet music. They, in turn, would set up shop on street corners, singing the songs, distributing the music to bystanders and encouraging them to join in. If the melody “struck a chord,” Parisians were ready to pay a few pennies to take the sheet music home to play on the piano or sing with family and friends.

I’m tempted to sigh, those were the good old days, but perhaps that’s what many songs devoted to Paris are all about. They make us feel nostalgic about a mythic city that only exists in song and in our dreams.

As for Pottsville and song, this exhibit got me thinking about George Korson, a reporter at The Pottsville Republican in the 1920’s and a life-long collector of anthracite folklore and song until his death in 1967. The songs he recorded are available on the CD “Songs and Ballads of the Anthracite Miners” (Round Rounder 1502), and, on You Tube, you can hear Pottsville miner William E. Keating singing “Down, Down, Down,” recorded by Korson in 1946. Those too were the good old days.