La Môme Piaf

Nowadays I spend a lot of time listening to Édith Piaf before or after, or even during and instead of work. I have already posted her "La vie en rose" earlier. It made me think what makes me listen to her music so much. Not only her voice, as I realized after watching the movie about her life, which bears the same title as her signature voice just mentioned made in 2007. Actress Marion Cotillard has also a nice song, and yet I was always waiting to hear Piaf singing her songs (actually some of them were dubbed indeed). No, I think it is rather the intensity that she put into singing that is addictive.

Piaf had a very stormy life. Her career started in 1935, when a night club owner discovered her after hearing her singing on the streets. Despite some hardships (including her being considered as a suspect in the murder case of her patron), she continued to become the most popular French singer during and after the second world war. It was in the euphoria over the end of the war that she wrote the lyrics for La vie en rose. In 1949, "the love affair of her life", the boxer Marcel Cerdan died in a plane crash while on the way to meet her. This marks the beginning of the most intense period of her life, paralleled by the fast deterioration of her health, due to sickness, a series of accidents and addiction. She died at 47, looking some 20 years older. I have the intention here to show a number of video recordings from this period showing not only the dramatic changes she went through, but perhaps more importantly the unaltered intensity of her singing throughout. She sang the first song posted here, "Hymne à l'amour" only a month after Cerdan's death. The second one "Padam... Padam..." is from 1951, and I have chosen it for its intensity than for anything else.

In the 1950s she had several near fatal car accidents, breaking her ribs at one time, and leaving her with addiction to morphine and alcohol. The recording of "l'Accordéoniste" is from this period (1954). I am simply amazed by the strength of her delivery... Another song "La Foule" is of Latin American origin. The recording is from 1961, one of Piaf's attempts to save the L'olympia music hall from bankruptcy.

The series of performances she began in 1961 are sometimes called the suicide tour. Indeed, she died in 1963 in liver cancer wanting to perform until the last moment. One of the new songs written to her in this final period was "Non, je ne regrette rien". This song was in a sense the final stroke in her carrier, and it is only fitting to finish this collection of recordings with it. The recording is one of her last perfromances from 1962 in the Netherlands.