Songs

I find sung French really hard to comprehend, but once I learn to sing a song the words stick with me and the vocabulary is entrenched. Here’s some singers and some songs I’ve encountered.

George Brassens

One of my favorite. Singer-songwriter of the 1950’s and 1960’s whose hits include Les copains d’abord and Le gorille. Very popular in France. He was born in 1921, so the year 2021 brought a good crop of tribute material for his (posthumous) 100th anniversary : concerts, podcasts, documentaries, etc. I have really dug my teeth into Brassens, listened to his complete catalog, studied many of his lyrics and skimmed his biography. In addition to being a singer-songwriter he was a humanist, activist, anarchist and pacifist. His songs are imaginative and provocative (gorilla escaping from cage and raping a magistrate, lightning rod salesman whose wife commits adultery, letter to a thief who robbed his house). He was a pioneer of the one-man-and-a-guitar sound.

Singers to Explore

Here’s a list of singers that have been recommended to me whom I’d like to explore. I’m not familiar with their works yet.

  • Francis Cabrel
  • Renaud
  • Jean Ferrat
  • Léo Ferré
  • Laurent Voulzy
  • Michel Sardou
  • Serge Gainsbourg
  • Charles Aznavour
  • Daniel Balavoine
  • Claude François
  • Jean-Jacques Goldman
  • Pierre Bachelet
  • Joe Dassin
  • Christophe

Playlist

Here’s a list of songs that I’ve encountered and listened to once or more. I’ll write about some of them one of these days. Meanwhile, you can sample from the list.

These came from a 2020-08-11 blog post by Natalie Collet at the Boston French Cultural Center: