Jean Ferrat’s feat: competing with Elvis Presley and Johnny Hallyday. Like what, we can dream by living a simple love in an HLM in the Paris suburbs.
However, the song “Ma môme” is written far from the greyness of the Parisian suburbs. Jean Ferrat is on vacation on the French Riviera surrounded by his wife Christine Sèvres, his author friend Pierre Frachet and his fiancee. The small group sunbathes on the beach, when Jean Ferrat offers the young woman sunglasses. Lapidary answer, “I’m not a starlet, I don’t wear sunglasses”. Pierre Frachet writes the sequel, and just to make it popular that she “doesn’t pose for magazines and that she works in a factory in Créteil”.
From the first appearances on the radio, “Ma môme” is taken over by the whole of France. And for those who don’t have the means to bask in the pill on the southern beaches, Ferrat and Frachet give a layer of it, “we people from the suburbs, we don’t go to Saint-Paul-de Vence, we spend all our holidays in Saint Ouen”.
Southern suburbs, Villeneuve-le-Roi, Choisy, Ivry and Créteil… Everything has changed in 60 years, the class and factory spirit has disappeared. There remains “this kid from 25 banks” who doesn’t give a damn about air and time, so much so that each generation of singers rediscovers song like the ragga hip-hop artist Mao Sidibé.