Even so, audiences still...

Even so, audiences still listened to the recitals, recordings or broadcasts of home-grown sentimental singers like Freely, Dania or the rising Pilaf, where they found stories of the street to weep to, populist melodramas with a castoff pimps, broken-hearted prostitutes and sun-tanned legionnaires, known misleadingly as the ‘realist song’. Steadily, however, during the 1930s, the modernizing wind of the 1920s began to blow through chanson too. It came partly from the assimilation of jazz rhythms and arrangements, and partly from subject matter of more complex and wider-ranging emotions, expressed with greater lyrical sophistication. It was associated with the incremental rise of the singer-songwriter. Hawkins perceptively observes that French song has periodically become a popular art with literary ambitions at times when artists and intellectuals have taken an interest in it.23 At such moments, chanson acquires a different form of legitimacy from that conferred simply by the market, and some creative individuals are encouraged to turn to it as a serious form capable of the expressive subtlety of literature. Monometer’s Le Chanter in the late nineteenth century is one instance: Brunt sang there, Sati named his third after it, and its journal printed work by Overlain and other poets.24 Hawkins identifies two other such periods: the 1930s, with contacts between Cocteau, Max Jacob and Tenet, for example; and the 1940s, with the Existentialists, Raymond Quinoa, Jacques Pervert and others, when Saint-German became a melting pot like Brunt’s Monometer.