2024-08-03 14:00:09
Find all episodes of the “Summer in Songs” series here.
At the beginning of the 1960s, in France, the blues, with the musical basis of rock’n’roll and swing, invaded the airwaves of radio stations and concert halls. Youth is your music, your magazine, Hi friendsits stars, including Sylvie Vartan, Sheila, Johnny Hallyday (1943-2017), Eddy Mitchell and The Black Socks, Dick Rivers (1945-2019) and The Wild Cats, Frank Alamo (1941-2012) and others are more ephemeral action.
To satisfy this audience, it is necessary to provide songs, which, in number, will be adaptations of Anglo-Saxon hits. Often words take many liberties for reasons of metrics, of the flow of French compared to English. One example among others, Sweets for Sweet Mefrom Drifters, in 1961, which he started with “Sweets for my sweet / Sugar for my honey / Your first sweet kiss / So happy for me”. It is a question for the narrator “Sweet for my lover” and a “first kiss” that is so much “it makes you shake”. When Frank Alamo sang it, in 1963, it became, with no mention throughout the song of kissing or orgasmic pleasure: “Doe, oh my wife/When you’re under the line/With a black pen/Your eyes are beautiful. »
Pour Winter Blues, co-written and composed by singer and guitarist Eddie Cochran (1938-1960), who performed it, and Jerry Capehart (1928-1998), released in August 1958, the French version is rather well done. These “summer blues”, which must be understood as “summer depression”, have become Summer Sunwritten by Dany Logan (1942-1984) in July 1963. Jacques Plante (1920-2003), who is the composer, retains the first lines of the song and the theme of the injustice of the elderly to the young.
A flawed hero
The hero of the song is not happy, because he has to work all summer for hardship (“Workin’ all summer / Just to try an’ earn a dollar”) and his boss asks him to come to work late, which prevents him from going out with his girlfriend. Dany Logan sings: “Hey, that should be banned (…) to work day and night when summer is outside.” His boss replied: “Boy, work till midnight” and there is no Sunday off, because “work until monday”. And no “little trip” with your lover.
It is true that Jacques Plante and Dany Logan did not go further than the original. Gone are the words about parents who prevent a child from taking their car, about the latter who wants to defend his cause with … the United Nations (!) And ended up writing to his representative in the United States Congress. Without achieving anything. In fact “There’s no cure / For the summer blues”“there is no cure for the summer blues”.
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