Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-r5zm4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-15T18:10:16.835Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

1 - Inventing la Môme

from Part I - Narrating Piaf

Get access

Summary

‘How monstrously she wanted to become something else’

(Henri Contet)

Édith Gassion was born on 19 December 1915, daughter of Annetta Giovanna Maillard, herself a street singer using the alias Line Marsa, and of Louis Gassion, a circus performer and itinerant acrobat and contortionist. Both parents came from circus or fairground backgrounds. They married in September 1914, the month after Louis was called up, separated probably in 1919 and finally divorced in 1929. Left alone, Annetta appears to have consigned her baby daughter to her half-Moroccan mother Aïcha until Louis, returning from the front to find the little girl dirty and unhealthy, removed her to his own mother's brothel in Bernay, where she found a degree of security and love. Around the age of seven, she moved again, joining the Caroli circus with her father and living in a caravan. When he later went solo and began performing acrobatics in the street, Édith passed the hat and, so the story goes, did a little singing to soften the hearts of the crowd. She recounts that the first ever song she sang publicly was the only one she knew at the time, the national anthem, the ‘Marseillaise’, though in an interview in 1936, at the time of the left-wing Popular Front government, she claimed it was the ‘Internationale’. Aged about 15, Édith struck out on her own, first taking several short-term jobs, then turning to street singing.

The French popular music economy of the 1920s and 1930s centred on Paris and involved three types of venue, though in practice the boundaries between them were unstable. One was the commercial music hall, where the dazzling revues for which Paris was famous had taken hold in the 1910s at the Folies-Bergère, the Olympia and the Casino de Paris, with their sequinned, feathered and bare-breasted dancing girls, glittering staircases and up-to-the-minute electrical effects. In the aftermath of war, the halls emulated the mass spectacles of Broadway in a wave of Americanisation, popularising jazz and associated dance styles like the charleston, the shimmy and the black bottom. Within the revue formula, established stars—among them Maurice Chevalier (1888–1972), Yvette Guilbert (1867–1944) and Mistinguett (1873–1956)— would deliver cheery, comic or salacious numbers. The hit songs of the time usually came from these revues, as did the latest singing stars, like Josephine Baker (1906–75) and the Corsican crooner Tino Rossi (1907–83).

Type
Chapter
Information
Édith Piaf
A Cultural History
, pp. 27 - 44
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×