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Rating: Edith Piaf was certainly one of the most fascinating figures of 20th-century popular music.
First of all, she had a life that calling tumultuous and contradictory is a sheer understatement, capable of making the mythologized adventures of a Robert Johnson or a Jim Morrison pale in comparison, and that intertwined in a surprising way with the destinies of that France for which she remains a shining icon of the 20th century.
A childhood that seems straight out of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables: born on the street to an Italian prostitute, raised among brothels and orphanages. Then came the beginnings of her career in a lowly nightclub and the alleged involvement in the murder of her mentor. Suspicions of collaboration with Vichy officials, yet also incessant collaborations with Jewish musicians. The writing of a piece - "La Vie En Rose", certainly the Song of the cousins par excellence - which in 1946 marked the desire to restart of a wounded and humiliated nation, while "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" would become the anthem of the pieds noirs embittered with De Gaulle, returning from Algeria in the last act of France's bloody colonialism. Finally, the death of boxer Marcel Cedarn, her great love, and the inevitable resort, to ease yet another chagrin d'amour, to the grips of alcohol and drugs. From whose chains death freed her in 1963.
And then there was her voice: powerful and exquisitely sweet, capable of igniting in multiple shades, and a repertoire that ranged from raw and intimate ballads to classic Parisian and Central European cabaret to incorporate orchestral jazz elements.
Edith began her climb to success at the end of the 1930s. Old Europe was about to enter the abyss of war, and in a bloated and decadent Paris, the stories told by "Le Mome Piaf" (Little Sparrow) were all the rage. Street poetry, prostitutes, thieves, outcasts, intense and dramatic loves against a backdrop of absolute poverty: the unrolling of the beads of that melodramatic realism which, shaped by Edith's magnificent expressiveness, would soon constitute a fundamental archetype of popular song, well beyond the realm of the chansonniers. Edith herself often wrote her lyrics, inaugurating the archetype of the singer-songwriter, in an era dominated by performers (like the nonetheless immense contemporary Billie Holliday, with whom she shared a fate on the brink of an abyss redeemed by an inimitable voice).
Songs like "Mon Légionnaire", "Le Vieux Piano", "L'accordéoniste", "Milord", "C'est l'Amour" or the already mentioned "La Vie En Rose" and "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" still shine with the immortal light of classics: outside of time but within History. Just like Edith Piaf.
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