Oh, Renee. My beautiful Renée of love. Our beloved Renée Martel. Gone for good. Quebec is a jukebox, a playlist, each one has a song of her that plays on repeat since, by way of press release, the “obituary” fell while the snow fell in the late afternoon, Saturday. All the titles are appropriate, it seems. A love that does not want to die. If we could start over. When a boat passes. See you tomorrow my darling. Take my hand. Until the end of show. The end is sad. A corner of the sky.
In my seven-and-a-half-year-old child’s head, as if the single DSP label skipped to never end, I hear, I hear, I hear Liverpool’s last words, Renée’s first chart-topping success Martel, published at the end of 1967, resounding in the transistors throughout the Belle Province at the beginning of 1968. “And up there on the steel bridge / Eyes drowned in tears / The girl utters a cry similar to the cry of a tugboat… ”How many of us, the seven and a half years, are singing this melody today? How many are they, the fifteen-twenty years of 1968-1973, all in love with this impossibly blonde Renée Martel who looked as much like Catherine Deneuve as Marianne Faithfull, this young girl from Drummonville who also wanted to go to London? ” doing cinema ” ?
Our lives parallel his
By successive generations, we joined Renée Martel. We have lived our lives at the same time as long pieces of his, whose weeklies have recounted the trials, the tragedies, the comebacks, the setbacks and the triumphs. We grew up, aged, loved, suffered, loved again, we did “the round of the seasons” with her, as the title of her adaptation of the song by Buffy Saint-Marie says. Sure and certain that there are still people who saw her on stage with her mother Noëlla Therrien and her father Marcel Martel, around 1952, a girl who sang just right, adorable.
Over the 74 years of his life, the career has 69. This is to say all the Renée Martels that we have met along the way. Not necessary in the order of publication of the discs. In 2010, the lovers of Xavier Dolan discovered in the film Les amours imaginaires a song from before their time, revived in Tarantino style: Come and change my life, adaptation of Color My Word by Petula Clark. “If you want to change my life / I’ll make you happy …” I know teenagers who know by heart Our children’s games, The boat of happiness, Golden cowgirl.
Sing with her
When Renée sang the Lament for Saint Catherine of the McCarrigle sisters with Mara Tremblay and Catherine Durand, during a “carte blanche” at the FrancoFolies in Montreal, I swear, all three were sisters: one party some girls. The joy of singing together is timeless. Renée Martel, a bit like an Emmylou Harris, will have shared the microphone a lot, on record as well as on stage. We find her in the company of Noëlla and Marcel, of course, but also with Michel Pagliaro, Daniel Lavoie, Robert Charlebois … and even Richard Desjardins (in love with her since adolescence, of course!), Who wrote her the wonderful song To a crystal heart. They will sing it together at the very end of the 100th anniversary performance of Le Devoir, at the Metropolis: “Where to start / I just don’t know where to end / I wouldn’t want to break everything / Especially our beautiful memories”.
Interpreter first, even if she herself wrote most of the adaptations of her hits from England or the United States, she also nurtured loyalty with people who wrote and composed for her: Martine Pratte, Nelson Minville, Bourbon Gautier, Martine Coupal have greatly enriched his repertoire over the past decades. A Pierre Huet, a François Guy, a Pierre Flynn, a Michel Rivard will also have seized the opportunity to offer her at least one song, which was for everyone (and often for her) a dream come true.
Two, preferably
From variety shows to variety shows (Patrick and Renée; Country Center-ville), from the album Nous to shows for two, Patrick Norman and Renée Martel have almost led a parallel career. Against Winds and Tides, Renée’s latest album, in a duet with Paul Daraîche, continued this very country tradition, in the Dolly Parton-Kenny Rogers fashion. This record, it should be mentioned, was still enthroned yesterday at the top of sales: we can bet that it will be there for a long time.
In spectacle, if Liverpool, Kiss Me, Johnny angel, This is my story, among other unforgettable ones, were awaited and duly given back, if it did not fail to pay homage to his father and to the other pioneers of Quebec country music, it offered a lot, a lot of new material. The public welcomed everything with happiness: Renée Martel was not only loved, we supported her in her career, we supported her, we rejoiced for her.
Victories against fate
There was something. Each return on stage was a victory against the fate which, in a bewildering way, hung over her. A list, even partial, of the titles of the chapters of the autobiography My life I love you (written in collaboration with his son Dominique, published in 2002), hurts his stomach: “Victim of rape at 18 years old. Unintended pregnancies. My suicide attempt. An inevitable bankruptcy. My descent into hell. The confession of my alcoholism. The disease strikes. The death of my father. The following years did not spare him more: suicide of his lover, collapse of the lungs, recurrent cancers. Despite everything, she recovered, healed, took the necklace back on. That pneumonia finally wins will have taken us all by surprise: so often condemned, so often returned to active life, we had come to believe her invincible.
She also ended up rallying everyone, the general public and critics from all media, to her cause: long looked at from above, the popular song of the youthful years of today, country music will have found in her a ground. commmon. I will recall in this my first meeting with her, in 1992, when the album appeared. Authentic. In the 2002 autobiography, she remembers her mistrust: “So let’s see […] to believe that Le Devoir will take an interest in me ”. The seven-and-a-half-year-old fan and music critic arrived with a big bag full of Featured Photos with her on the front page, and the entire collection of 33s and 45s. I spread it all out on a table, and I said to him, “I love you. We start from there … “
There would be enough to fill a special notebook with texts that I have devoted to him over the years. And the more I got to know her, the more I loved her. Renée knew how to love, and understood better and better that she was loved so much. She’s the one we mourn, not the star. His gaze, his smile, his voice, his heart. We are in mourning for our faithful friend, for our collective and personal love at the same time. And we think of the sister of Mario Martel, the mother of Dominique and Laurence Lebel, the grandmother of Henri, Noah, Éli and Dante.