“In France, everything ends with songs,” says the poet. This lovely word has given the idea to Mireille Dumas to devote themselves fully to a book entitled The France songs* to the song writers and troubadours that have magnified the softness and the beauty of our country.
In this anthology, chosen lovingly with our fellow Patrice Gascoin, “psy PAF” gives readers a little of his famous Proust’s Madeleine. From the introduction to his anthology: “as far as it will go back to my memories, the song has rocked my life. Strangely, the nursery rhymes that I know do not appear out of childhood, but of a more advanced age, when my mother remembered those of his young years in Italy. They remain engraved in me to never forget that we are the fruit of those scholars who forge the identity of France.”
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Figaro asked Mireille Dumas to elect the most beautiful stages of the tour de France enchanted, “You are me press compose, in sum, the anthology my anthology”, she reacted spontaneously. And then after some hesitation, she chose the songs “whose words me upset”: Ferrat, Brassens, Brel, Souchon, Voulzy, Nougaro, Ferré, Lavilliers, and, of course, the author of Douce France , Charles Trenet.
● M France Jean Ferrat
“This is a song that upsets me because it has a great poetic. Ferrat refers to France, and curves of the Provence, seasons, colors, but also its values, people who work, of freedom, of equality, of fraternity. In 1969, he speaks, ahead of its time, of the values of the host are ignored. He will be Prohibited from ORTF for almost two years…”
● Toulouse Claude Nougaro
“There is a tendency today to forget Nougaro and it is unjust because Toulouse , among others, is a true masterpiece. The singer Yves Duteil said: “He has written Toulouse as if he had built”…”
● Plea to be buried at the beach of Sète Georges Brassens
“He started and finished his songs in Sète. The beginning and the end of everything. He confessed one day: “I had finished this song but I had found neither the first line nor the last”.”
● The surnames of Paris Jacques Brel
“It was the gift of Jacques, a man of low Countries in this city that had welcomed him. And then what can I add to these verses: ‘And that day finally where you do say no, it’s Paris tonight/ A room and a little sad which is the stop of the round, and it is Paris the two of us/ with An eye that receives the tenderness of the world, and it is Paris in your eyes…””
● Paname Léo Ferré
“Rail and Paris it is a long story. He speaks to him first as a person. And then, one day as a great love ceases he wrote Paris, I love you more . From Tuscany, the country of Leonardo da Vinci.”
● Hands gold of Bernard Lavilliers
“This song makes me cry. The blast furnaces, the misery, Lavilliers pays homage to the work of the workers who have sacrificed their lives to their work and end up without a job. A setting of end of the world.”
● Belle-Île-en-Mer, Marie-Galante by Alain Souchon and Laurent Voulzy
“Laurent Voulzy has narrated the birth of that song that tells his double attachment to Guadeloupe and Brittany: “I did listen to the music that I had scratched on my guitar Alain Souchon. The first word he has written, it is Belle-Île-en-Mer, this beautiful island in the south of Quiberon that he knew and I knew. And then I found Marie-Galante, because my mother has experienced as a child…””
● D ouce France Charles Trenet
“It is always said that Trenet is not a singer engaged. But when he writes: “Yes, I love you in joy and pain”, it did make sense during the Occupation. Its recovery in 1980 by Rachid Taha and his group residence Card lights up and all of a sudden.”
France in songs of Mireille Dumas in collaboration with Patrice Gascoin, ed du Cherche-Midi, 184 pages, 20 euros.
