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Edith Piaf
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Edith Piaf was one of the most popular French singers of the 1940s and '50s, internationally famous for her husky, mournful voice and her songs of loneliness and despair. Born in Paris to street entertainers, her childhood was marked by poverty, illness and temporary blindness. After a stint with her father's touring acrobatic act, she sang in the streets until she was discovered by promoter Louis Leplee, who re-named her "la môme Piaf" ("the waif sparrow"). The diminutive singer gained popularity as she toured France, singing in cabarets and vaudeville theaters and, beginning in 1936, performing on radio and recordings. Her great fame came after World War II, with her song "Le Vie en Rose" becoming an international standard. She toured the United States several times beginning in the late 1940s and English versions of her songs made the pop charts in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
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Edith Piaf (December 19, 1915–October 11, 1963) was one of France's most beloved singers, and became a national icon. Her singing reflected her tragic life, with her specialty being the poignant ballad performed in a heartbreaking voice. Among her famous songs are "La vie en rose" (1946), "Hymne à l'amour" (1949), "Milord" (1959), "Non, je ne regrette rien" (1960). A filmed biography on her life, entitled La Vie En Rose, was released in the US in the summer of 2007. There have been other dramatized versions of her life, including a Tony Award-winning play entitled Piaf, which was ... telecast on PBS.
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Edith Piaf still looms large as France's biggest singer. She was known as "the waif sparrow" -- an apt description for someone who projected a seemingly contradictory air of fragile toughness. Like Billie Holiday, she overcame grim, Dickensian beginnings, only to wallow in dark torch songs that somehow projected strength instead of self-pity. Besides romance, she sang about sex, death and drug addiction in a straightforward fashion that still seems shocking even in these desensitized times. Her taboo subject matter ensured that many of her songs would be banned from the radio, but even that failed to tarnish her star through out the 1930s, '40s and '50s. She cultivated songwriters and helped jump-start the careers of such fellow wounded icons as Yves Montand and Charles Aznavour.
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From the grime of a Paris slum, to the sparkle of Carnegie Hall, Edith Piaf's amazing trajectory is still hard to believe. She was born Edith Gassion in 1915. Her mother was a street singer, her father a circus contorsionist. Both were alcoholics. She ended up in the care of her paternal grandmother who ran a brothel. When her father took the little girl back to help with his roving street show, she began singing to make extra money.
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Several years after her death, in a highly publicized ceremony, Maurice Chevalier unveiled a plaque outside no. 115 on the rue de Belleville in Paris commemorating the spot where Edith Piaf had not been born. The legend was intact.
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Biography: Edith Piaf is almost universally regarded as France's greatest popular singer. Still revered as an icon decades after her death, "the Sparrow" served as a touchstone for virtually every [C]hansonnier, male or female, who followed her. Her greatest strength wasn't so much her technique, or the purity of ...Read full biography
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Edith Piaf