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Georges Brassens

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Georges Brassens

Georges Brassens (IPA: [ʒɔʁʒ bʁaˈsɛ̃s] in French) (October 22, 1921 - October 29, 1981) was a French acoustic singer and songwriter.

Georges Brassens was born in Sète (then called Cette), in southern France, thirty-six kilometers south of Montpellier. Now an iconic figure in France, he achieved fame through his simple, elegant songs and articulate, diverse lyrics; indeed, he is considered one of France's best postwar poets, and won the national poetry prize. He also set to music poems by many well-known and relatively obscure poets, including Louis Aragon (Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux), Victor Hugo, Jean Richepin, François Villon, Guillaume Apollinaire and others.

During World War II, he was forced to work at a labour camp by the Germans at an aircraft engine plant of BMW in the Service du Travail Obligatoire, (STO, enforced labour), in Basdorf near Berlin in Germany (March 1943). There were many other celebrities, and celebrities to be, at the camp.[citation needed] Here Brassens met some of his future friends, such as Pierre Onteniente, whom he called Gibraltar because the latter was "steady as a rock." They would become the closest of friends.

After being given ten days' leave in France, he decided not to go back to the labour camp. Brassens took refuge in a little slum called "Impasse Florimont" where he lived for several years with the owner of the place, Jeanne Planche, a friend of his aunt. Jeanne lived with her husband Marcel in a dead end street without gas, running water or electricity. He remained hidden there until the end of the war five months later, but ended up staying for 22 years. Planche was the inspiration for Brassens's song Jeanne.

Biography

Childhood

Brassens grew up in the family home in Sète, surrounded by his mother, Elvira Dragosa, his father, Jean-Louis Brassens, his half-sister, Simone (daughter of Elvira and her first husband, who was killed in the war), and his paternal grandfather, Jules. His mother, who came from a Napolitan family, was a devout Catholic. His father was easy-going, generous, openminded, anticlerical, and an original thinker. Georges was to grow up flanked by these utterly different types, who nonetheless shared one thing: a love for singing. Songs echoed through the house all day long. Between his mother—whom Brassens labelled a "militant singer" (militante de la chanson)—and Simone and Jules, every pair of lips was singing. Quite naturally, Georges came to love songs. At the time he listened constantly to his early idols: Charles Trenet, Tino Rossi, even Ray Ventura . He forged a culture of song, copious and eclectic, which his memory preserved like a precious heritage. He loved music above all else: it was his first passion and the path that led him to song. Music provided something he found nowhere else, and he told his friend André Sève, "[It is] a kind of internal vibration, something intense, a pleasure that has something of the sensual to it." He hoped to enroll at the conservatory of music but his mother insisted that he could only do so if his grades improved. He was never to learn to read music. Georges was not much of a student, closer to the class dunce than to the star pupil, and he preferred playing and fighting with pals from the neighborhood to the homework that bored him.

In ninth grade he discovers poetry thanks to his French teacher Alphonse Bonnafé. Before that he was already writing small songs and dreamed of being a poet. That year, the young boy decided to submit his first poetic tries to Bonnafé who found much fault with them, but encouraged Brassens by telling him to be more rigorous and to start studying classical poetry. Brassens got interested in versification and rhyme. The influence of Bonnafé on Brassens is enormous: "We were thugs, at fourteen, fifteen, and we started to like poets. That is quite a transformation. Thanks to this teacher, I opened my mind to something bigger. Later on, everytime I wrote a song, I asked myself the question: would Bonnafé like it?" At this point, Brassens neglected songs somewhat, dreaming of becoming a poet.

But at the time, friends still ruled Georges's world. He got into trouble and at age seventeen was implicated in an adventure that would be a turning point in his life. In order to make a little money, Georges and his gang decided to turn to small thefts whose principal victims were their respective families. Thus Georges stole a ring and a bracelet from his sister, only to be found out by the police, resulting in a scandal. The young men were characterized as "high school mobsters", "scum". Some of the perpetrators, let down by their families, spent time in prison. However Jean-Louis Brassens was more forgiving and immediately picked up his son. Brassens was expelled from school and decided to move to Paris in February 1940, after a short spell as an apprentice mason in his father's business, while the war had already broken out.

Wartime

Put up by his aunt Antoinette in the 14th arrondissement, he put the household piano to good use, teaching himself the basics of the instrument. And he took a job at Renault. In May 1940 the factory was bombed and France was invaded. Not exactly dragging his heels, Brassens returned to Sète and a happy reunion with his family and friends.

The beginning of his career

His friends who heard and liked songs urged him to go and try them out in a cabaret, café or concert hall. He was shy and had difficulty performing in front of people. The owner of a cafe told him that his songs were not the type he was looking for. But at one point he met the singer Patachou in a very well-known cafe, Les Trois Baudets, and she brought him into the music scene. Several famous singers came into the music industry this way, including Jacques Brel and Léo Férré.

Songs

He rarely performed outside his own country, and his lyrics are difficult to translate, though attempts have been made. He began his career in the 1950s. He performed with an acoustic guitar; most of the time, his only accompanying musician was his friend Pierre Nicolas with a double bass, and sometimes a second guitar (Barthélémy Rosso, Joël Favreau).
Some of his most famous songs:

  • Les copains d'abord, about a boat of that name, and friendship, written for a movie Les copains (1964) directed by Yves Robert;
  • Chanson pour l'Auvergnat, lauding those who take care of the downtrodden against the pettiness of the bourgeois and the harshness of law enforcement;
  • La cane de Jeanne for Marcel and Jeanne Planche, who befriended and sheltered him; and others
  • La mauvaise réputation — "the bad reputation", semi-autobiography;
  • Les amoureux des bancs publics — about young lovers who kiss each other publicly and shock self-righteous people;
  • Le gorille — tells, in a humorous fashion, of a gorilla with a large penis (and admired for this by ladies) who escapes and, mistaking a robed judge for a woman, forcefully sodomizes him; the song contrasts the wooden attitude that the judge had when sentencing a man to death by the guillotine, with his cries of mercy when being assaulted by the gorilla; this song, considered pornographic, was banned for a while; the song's refrain (Gare au gori – i – i – i – ille, "beware the gorilla") is widely known; (translated by Jake Thackray as Brother Gorilla, Greek songwriter and singer Xristos Thivaios as Ο Γορίλας (The Gorilla) and Italian songwriter Fabrizio De André (Il Gorilla)).
  • Supplique pour être enterré à la plage de Sète, describing his wish to be buried by the Gulf of Lion in his hometown.
  • Mourir pour des idées, describing the recurring violence over ideas and an exhortation to be left in peace (translated by Italian songwriter Fabrizio De André (Morire per delle idee))

Brassens died of cancer in 1981, in Saint-Gély-du-Fesc, having suffered health problems for many years, and rests at the Cimetière le Py in Sète.

Legacy

He never suspected that one day he'd have an international renown. His idol, Paul Misraki, a singer who sang everywhere, never became famous among the general public. Now more than 50 doctoral dissertations have been written about Georges Brassens, and many artists from Japan, Russia, United States (where there is a Georges Brassens' fan club), Italy and Spain make cover versions of his songs. His songs have been translated into 20 languages, including Esperanto.

Many singers have covered Georges Brassens' lyrics in other languages, for instance Fabrizio De André (in Italian), Graeme Allwright and Jake Thackray (in English), Sam Alpha (in creole), Yossi Banai (in Hebrew), Jiří Dědeček (in Czech), Mark Freidkin (in Russian), Paco Ibáñez and Javier Krahe (in Spanish), Jacques Ivart (in esperanto), Franz Josef Degenhardt and Ralf Tauchmann (in German) and Zespół Reprezentacyjny and Piotr Machalica (in Polish), Cornelis Vreeswijk (Swedish) and Tuula Amberla (in Finnish). Franco-Cameroonian singer Kristo Numpuby also released a cover-album with the original French lyrics but adapted the songs to various African rhythms.

Nowadays, there is an international association of Georges Brassens fans. There is also a fan club in Berlin-Basdorf which organizes a Brassens festival every year in September.

Brassens composed about 250 songs, but only 200 were recorded. The other 50 were unfinished.

Renée Claude, an important Québécois singer, dedicates a tribute-album to him, J'ai rendez-vous avec vous (1993).

His songs have a major influence on younger French singers (Maxime Le Forestier, Renaud Séchan, Bénabar etc)

Heritage sites

File:Georges Brassens, plaque commémorative, Paris.jpg
Georges Brassens (plaque in Paris)

A lot of schools, theatres, parks, public gardens, and public places are dedicated to Georges Brassens and his work, and are named after him, for instance:

  • A park built on the site of the former Vaugirard slaughterhouses, was named parc Georges Brassens. Brassens lived a large part of his life about hundred metres from the slaughterhouses, at 9 impasse Florimont and then at 42 rue Santos Dumont.
  • The Place du Marché of Brive-la-Gaillarde was renamed Place Georges Brassens, as a tribute to women that had had a clash here with the French gendarmerie, a clash he evoked in one of his songs, Hécatombe.
  • In the Paris Métro station Porte des Lilas (Line 11) there is a mural portrait of Brassens along with a quote from his song "La Porte des Lilas", written for the 1957 film "Porte des Lilas" by René Clair. In this film, Brassens had a supporting role, practically playing himself.
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