It’s a song that resembles us. The communist diplomacy of the song

Let us return to the forgotten history of the tours in the USSR and in the Eastern countries of Yves Montand, Juliette Gréco, Jacques Brel and a few others, organized by an organization linked to the PCF.

In partnership with the exhibition It’s a song that resembles us – Worldwide hits of French-language popular music At the Cité internationale de la langue française in Villers-Cotterêts, these chronicles look in detail at each of the stories presented there.

The sound of this song by Juliette Gréco is not great. It is a floppy disc that was only released in the Soviet Union – October, lyrics by Jean Dréjac, music by Philippe Gérard, two creators who did not hide, at one time, their proximity to the French Communist Party.

And this song tells the story of the October Revolution of 1917, which gave birth to the USSR. But Juliette Gréco never sang it in France and, until 2003, it was only known to a Francophile Soviet audience.

There are not many sound documents like this one left to commemorate this unique epic in the history of French song. And yet, things happened in the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, at the time of the Iron Curtain.

In this episode of It’s a song that resembles usyou hear excerpts from:

Juliette Greco, October, in public, 1967

Jacques Brel, Amsterdam, in public, 1967

Jacques Brel with Denise Glaser, Discorama, 1966

Yves Montand, The Grands Boulevards, in public, 1959

Yves Montand, When a soldier, in public, 1953

Jean Ferrat, Potemkin, 1965

Juliette Greco, October, in public, 1967

You can also extend this column with the book It’s a song that resembles us published by Heritage Publishing.

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