Documents found
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222.More information
Although long denigrated by a certain elite and relatively ignored in studies of popular music, Mary Travers Bolduc (1894-1941) is today considered to be both Quebec's first singer-songwriter and its first popular music star. At a time when women enjoyed little to no autonomy, her career seems both an anomaly and an achievement. However, the image of the independent woman who manages her career and organizes her tours appears contradictory with her songs, in which she remains faithful to the traditional values of her generation regarding the role of women in society. Listening to Madame Bolduc's songs in the context of her personal archives allows us to better understand the one nicknamed “La Bolduc,” who was at the same time a woman, wife and mother, as well as a self-taught artist and “queen of comic song”, halfway between folklore and popular music. This examination can give further context for why critics have been lukewarm for so long. We can also better measure the value of her work in relation to the society in which she evolved. In this article, I argue that the condescending attitude towards her during her career and the silence that followed her death are based on prejudice—prejudice not because she was a woman, but because of the social class to which she belonged and mirrored. It was not so much the meaning of the words in her songs that concerned some critics but her level of language, her sometimes ribald tone, and the style of her music—qualities that also made her a success. In the context of the revalorization of folklore and the golden age of joual popular music in Québec, Bolduc's rehabilitation in the 1960s can be explained by the evolution of public taste and of critics' horizon of expectation.
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223.More information
SummaryThe author has examined the first exhibition of national scope dedicated to Quebec popular music, Je vous entend chanter, as a key area for the study of the mechanism by which this type of music functions as a pivotal point in the production of facets of citizenship related to culture and identity. The documents and artifacts making up the exhibition, as well as the media coverage it received, serve to examine the material, institutional and discursive conditions which come together to make the history of popular music the history of the "Quebec people". The analysis explores the complex interplay of memories that promote the contrasting ways in which the event states, names and relates the place of popular Quebec music, and, in so doing, the forms of allegiance, identification and belonging which are linked to it.
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228.More information
The contribution of folk-singer Charles Marchand and his “Carillon canadien” to the history of the chanson in Québec before Madame Bolduc deserves to be better understood. First, the article proposes a biographical update about this overlooked artist and his professional networks (magazines, sheet music, concerts, festivals, records, radio broadcastings). Second, the author introduces the new concept of “transfolklorisation” in order to analyze Charles Marchand's chanson performing practices that blend elements from music and theater. The “Carillon canadien” consisted in French Canadian folk-singing, operatic vocals, Montmartre café-concert influences and a taste for French modern theater.