After listening to Nana Mouskouri’s Nouvelles chansons de la Vieille France (1978), I dug up the album that preceded it, Vieilles chansons de France (1973). Both albums, covering a wide variety of traditional French melodies, some dating from the middle ages, acted as a useful reminder that Canadian folk music owes something to France. The Canadian folk tradition is so saturated with Celtic elements — one musicologist classified the whole country as a “Celtic out-island” — that one forgets that many of the oldest songs do come from France. Listening to these two albums, I found it easy to guess what part of France a song came from. If the song sounded vaguely familiar and had a “Canadian feeling” to it, it turned out to have come from Britanny, Normandy, or the Lower Loire. These are, of course, the places where the bulk of the first settlers in Canada originated, the maritime villages of the west coast of France. Many of these settlers did not even speak French, but were Bretons, whose Celtic language is closest to Welsh, so the earliest Canadian music already started out on a quasi-Celtic footing. Subsequently, wave after wave of Scottish and Irish music deeply Celticized the folk music of all of Canada, whether it was sung in French, English, Gaelic, or aboriginal languages. But in many cases, the original melody does come from France, and occasionally has survived in both countries. It’s interesting to hear them sung by a European singer, though I suppose my own heritage will ensure that the Celticized Canadian versions will always feel “the right way” to me.
Mouskouri has been called “the the best selling female singer of all time” (though I suspect Lata Mangeshkar has a better claim to that title). A Greek, born at Chania, on Crete, she is still going strong, performing many concerts yearly at the age of 74. She sings in many languages, but she is best known for her work in French, and also American Jazz. Both these albums are delightful.
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