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| Colette Renard – Chansons gaillardes de la vielle France Disque Vogue LP, CLD 615 Made in France |
A good day at the thrift store for me consists of finding a whole collection of records interesting enough and cheap enough to keep the set intact. Good days like that occur more often than you would think. My collection of popular music from around the world got started when I came back home from a thrift store with a whole box of Latvian records in my hands. Later on I came back with a great Czechoslovakian collection, then a large number of medieval records, on another day with 40 or so Polish records, a few weeks ago I wrote on this blog about a collection from the Philippines, and now I've come home with a large collection of French records. They once belonged to a certain Henri Janneau who lived in Sunrise, Florida (nice name for a town! Must have been on Florida's east coast.) I found them all in a Goodwill store on the Tamiami trail just before entering Miami. From the stack of records I brought home (I didn't buy them all) I picked this one by Colette Renard to share. The record is a collection of old French (bawdy) folk songs. The song I picked from it is Au Clair de la Lune —click on the link above for a free download. Au Clair de la Lune is a childrens' lullaby but with a double entendre, many versions have been recorded, as a lullaby or as a bawdy libertine song, Renard's belongs to the latter. The song, according to some written by an anonymous composer in the 18th century, others credit the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), was the first song ever to be recorded. In April 1860, seventeen years before Edison recorded Mary Had a Little Lamb, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville managed to record sound for the first time. To Edison's credit, his Little Lamb could be played back immediately whilst the Frenchman's recording was never heard until 2008, when some American scientists managed to make it into a digital sound file.
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