To Jean Lejeune (1914-2010)

(3 generations out ot of 4 of Lejeune guys on this picture taken in 2008 : me, Jean and Basile)

My grandfather passed away during the night. He was My father's dad.

We used to call him Pépé (pronounced "pay-pay").

Pépé was great. He was a good and humble man. Pépé was a French teacher. Past students used to call him or went to see him in his remote house in Burgubndy long after his retirement.

Pépé was a man of words. Pépé wrote his life in a book. Pépé loved to tell stories. We loved to hear them. Poems by La Fontaine, Baudelaire, Victor Hugo. He loved Rimbaud and Proust (I hate Proust). He wrote poems too, in a 19th century style.
Pépé loved tennis and football. Pépé was a good tennis player. Pépé loved fishing.
Pépé loved Bach, Edith Piaf and Ray Charles. And Georges Brassens. My first memories of hearing Brassens were at his house in the country. Brassens to me is Biches (the name of the village where he lived).

Pépé had gone to World War II. He had been given a gun, a revolver, but he never shot it. His regiment never fought. He went home in 1940 and resumed his job. He bought his house in the country. He had met his wife at a ball in 1937 and they were married since that date. Until a few weeks ago, Pépé, although physically impaired, had kept all his wits and we talked on the phone everynow and then.
Pepe, as a school teacher, has meticulously-made photo albums with type-written texts detailling what he's done almost everyday from 1950 to 2000. It's just fascinating. He used to describe himself as a witness more than as a maker.
So for you, Pépé, I can olny post these Brassens songs :

Georges Brassens - Grand père (buy)

First, of course "Grand père", a fierce, humourous piece which tells of a poor family who loses their grandfather and try to have him buried, but nobody wants to do it because they have no money. So (pardon the translation)

"At the grocery store,
No money, no groceries
At lovely Suzanne's
No money, no thighs
Low status dead people
Are outside of my jurisdiction

Yet I had inherited from grandpa
A pair of pointed boots
If ass kicks get lost sometime
This one hit its goal"

It would make him laugh. And thank God we won't have the same problem to take him to his last resting place !

The other one, "Je m'suis fait tout petit" instantly brings me back memories of summers spent in his house.

Georges Brassens - Je me suis fait tout petit (buy) (1954)

Joyeux Noël

Leadbelly - On A Christmas Day (buy) (1944)


Georges Brassens - Le Père Noël et la petite fille (buy) (1960)

Have a nice Xmas dear readers !!

You'll find more great christmas music and pics at the Big rock candy mountain

Favorite roots albums : Georges Brassens Edition

Georges Brassens - Le Gorille (buy) (1953)

Georges Brassens - Le Bistrot (buy) (1960)

Sorry guys i haven't got much time these days due to my work with Acclaimed Music's album poll, in which you can still take part (more details here. )

While I'm knee-deep (and soon chest-deep) into lists of favorite albums, here's an artist who will have at least 3 or 4 albums in my top 200.

Brassens is the first thing I remember, musically speaking.
My grandfather used to play these 10-inch (25 cm) LPs, I was 3 or 4 years old and soon I knew some songs by heart and sang them in my grandparents' garden.

My father played these records too, singing along. I listened to them with my sisters and grew up with this music. That's probably why I love folk music today.



And Brassens still rules : he's folky, and sometimes jazzy à la Django (most of the time just a double bass and two accoustic guitars), he's the hell of a songwriter, he's an exquisite poet (much better than Brel to me, much more literate), he's fun, go to his biography on wiki or AMG if you don't know him.

The songs ? about God (the hilarious "Le Mécréant"), death and murder ("Le gorille"), love ("Je m'suis fait tout petit", two of his very best songs), and of course, booze ("Le Bistrot", about a bartender's wife).

"Le Gorille", one of his very first songs, was banned from airplay because of its lyrics. It even caused Brassens' mother, a devout Catholic to boycott his concerts.

You'll find English subtitles in this video to learn why. Brassens is old and sick in the video so the performance is not as good as in the record.

Happy 14 juillet (French National holiday)

Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli - Echoes of France (La Marseillaise, French national anthem) (buy) (1947)

Georges Brassens - La Mauvaise Réputation (buy) (1953)


July 14 (called Bastille day in English, althoug we never call it that way) is France's national holiday.

Tonight there'll be fireworks and "bals populaires", big balls for the people, generally held on every village/town big square or at the fire station (traditionally it's the firemen who are in charge of the dances).

Tommorrow will be the day of the big military parade on the Champs Elysées.

Georges Brassens, one of our greatest folk songwriters and poets (and my favorite French singer) says, in "La Mauvaise Réputation" (Bad Reputation) that "on the 14th day of July, I stay in my cosy bed / Marching music is none of my business"...

It's a great occasion to play old French music. This version of "La Marseillaise" (our national anthem) by Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli is my favorite by far, and, since it's an instrumental, you don't hear those agressive lyrics about war and blood.

Sometimes I tell myself that I should play more French music here, even though this blog is more about my love for American music. Don't hesitate to give comments if you liked those French songs, I could give you more. Sometimes, too, I wish that American people in general were a little bit more curious about other countries'cultures...

My bonus track : Boris Vian, a great songwriter, jazz critic, trumpet player and most of all, a fantastic author of novels, plays and short stories, begins this song (whose title can be translated as "We're not here to be given hell") with a humorous account of how he went to the military parade with his wife just to be held back by the police, and the way he protested (in a very French manner). In the next stanza the same guy goes home drunk with a friend and this time it's his wife that gives him hell, and hits him so hard with the rolling-pin that he ends up in heaven with his buddy, and once again they're turned back by St Peter. To which Vian answers "If you kick out the drunk, there must'nt be a lot of people left"... So the two of them go to hell, "and downstairs it was marvellous". The morale of the story : Protesting may prove fruitful in the long run...

Boris Vian - On n'est pas là pour se faire engueuler (buy) (1956)

Songs about hanged men : Georges Brassens vs Billie Holiday

The other day, I was listening to this wonderful album by Georges Brassens. Brassens is the first thing I remember, musically speaking. My grandfather played these 10-inch (30cm) LPs, I was 3 or 4 years old and soon I knew some songs by heart and sang them to my grandparents' friends in their garden. I listened to them with my sisters in the big upstairs room, especially this one. And Brassens still rules : he's folk, and sometimes jazzy à la Django (always just a double bass and two accoustic guitars), he's the hell of a songwriter, he's an exquisite poet (much better than Brel to me, much more literary), he's fun, go to his biography on wiki or AMG if you don't know him. The songs ? about God (the hilarious "Le Mécréant"), love (a modern-day "Pénélope", wife of Ulysses, "L'Orage). And death. And murder. Brassens (1921-81) is from another era, pre-rock, he's fond of 19th century poets and obsessed by the Middle ages.

So this is what brings us to the point : hanged men. Hanging poems are a tradition in French literature. If you can read French, this page gives a lot of examples of poems about the subject. The first and most famous one was François Villon's "Ballade des pendus", written while in prison (Villon was a thief and a homosexual). Brassens loved Villon, but in this album, instead of singing "La Ballade des pendus", he adapted a poem by 19th century poet Bainville called "Le Verger du roi Louis" ("King Louis Orchard"), about king Louis XI.


Here are the French words

Now, let's go back 20 years, in 1940, in New York City, and to one of the most beautiful songs of all time, "Strange Fruit" by Billie Holiday. If you don't know the story behind that song, just go there. It was written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish high-school teacher from the Bronx, about the lynching of two black men. The song was inspired by a photograph he had seen the hanging (I thought about including the photo to my post, but it's much too morbid)




Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop.


Now, this is an awkward translation I did of the Brassens song

On its wide, overspread arms
The forest, where Flora awakes
Holds garlands of hung men
All golden in the morning light

This dark grove where the oak wears
Bunches of incredible fruit
Even for the Turk and the Moor
This is King Louis' orchard

All this poor wretched folks
Rolling with thoughts unknown
In great and desperate rings
Flutter, still throbbing with life
The rising sun devours them
Watch them, dazzled skies,
Dance in the fires of dawning
This is King Louis' orchard

These hung men, now heard by the devil
Summon new hung men to come
While in the skies of spread azure
Where a meteor seems to glow
The dew dies off in the air
A swarm of delighted birds
Upon their heads is pecking about
This is King Louis' orchard

Prince, there is a grove decorated
With clusters of hungmen, buried
In the soft and murmuring leaves
This is King Louis' orchard

Amazing, no ? Did Meropol know the poem by Banville ? Or Villon's Ballad of the Hung ?

Somebody suggested me to close this post with a Joy Division song, but that would be unappropriate and rude... or very black humor !

Speaking of humor, there's something I gotta tell you : when I first posted that, it was titled "Songs about HUNG men"... I posted about it in the Acclaimedmusic forum, and I got all this reactions from American guys... then I googled "hung men" and realized my mistake !!!!!
So I leave you with this song. Mississipi John Hurt, famous songster, sang both about HANGED men (Stack o'Lee) and HUNG men (in this song) :

Découvrez Georges Brassens!