– Lucille Dumont aux Rhythms de Paris – Nov. 2, 1951 – Radio Canada – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
Lucille Dumont tonight – an iconic Pop-Star and early TV personality from Quebec in the 1950s and who had her own radio show in 1951 before heading to TV where she became a staple of French TV throughout the 1950s.
Since you’re probably getting your ears adjusted to the sonic onslaught from Black Sabbath in 1974 from earlier today, I thought I would take it all down a lot of db’s and offer this out-of-the-way musical tidbit tonight just to quiet things down a bit.
Although she is not well known on this side of the border, Lucille Dumont was a huge star in French Canada and notable in France during those early days of Television, just before the advent of Rock n’ Roll. This was the state of Pop Music at the time – slow, tuneful, not complicated and certainly a staple in the diets of post World War 2 youth. High Voltage was out of the question and only practiced within the neatly isolated (at the time) confines of “race music” and a few Country-Western upstarts.
Even though the songs are all in French, the universal aspect of Pop Music at the time turned a lot of French Music as well as other Foreign language hits, into English-language versions and in some cases, sizable hits with new lives.
Listening to this program, you realize just how far music has come in those 64 years. Most likely, it sounds like music from another planet to a lot of people – but this was what most everyone listened to and became an indelible part of their lives in the course of the average day in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
If you aren’t predisposed to liking this sort of thing, it won’t make any sense to you, and you may want to tune out after the first song. But if you’re curious and want to hear what else was out there at the time, and maybe hear some possibilities with sampling – then you should check this out. Either way, you owe it to yourself to give it at least one listen to before you make up your mind. Not that this style of music will ever come back again – or come back in exactly that way – but like all Music, it can be absorbed, borrowed from and admired for what it is and filed away in your brain for future reference. Nothing more – nothing less.
And, you’ll be happy to know that Lucille Dumont is still around, at 96.
No need to crank it up. Just get comfy.
