I am French but for many, many years, I just couldn't get into Edith Piaf. It's not that I cringed at the somewhat clichéd France she represented — the omnipresent accordion and waltz rhythm conjuring images of baguettes and cigarettes hanging from pursed lips, a glass of red wine on a café counter. I actually love this France, the way an American may have an instinctive affinity with gum-snapping waitresses in corny diners. It was just that I found her songs too slow, too hackneyed, too willfully doleful. When it came to charting music from the mid-1930s-early 1960s (Piaf's active period), I much preferred the Great American Songbook, which felt more modern than Piaf's backwards-looking pathos. As for French songs of that period, I delighted in the swing stylings of Irène de Trébert, Suzy Solidor's sexual ambiguity, the comic verve of Arletty or Danielle Darrieux's romantic soprano — everybody but Piaf.

Then I saw the biopic La vie en rose in a movie theater back home, and suddenly Piaf clicked. I felt at one with the sold-out crowd and, at the end, we all cried together — it was just like when France won the World Cup in 1998! Revisiting… read more »