Edith Piaf (1915 to 1963) is the voice most people hear in their head when they think of French song. Born Édith Giovanna Gassion in the Belleville district of Paris, she grew up poor, sang on street corners as a teenager, and was discovered busking by a cabaret owner who nicknamed her "la Môme Piaf," the little sparrow. The name stuck, and so did the image: a tiny woman in a plain black dress, standing alone in a spotlight, filling a concert hall with an enormous trembling voice.
She became France's national singer and one of its first truly global stars. "La Vie en rose," which she wrote herself, is still her signature, alongside "Hymne à l'amour," "Milord," "La Foule" and "Non, je ne regrette rien." Her songs are almost always about love, loss and stubborn survival, sung in the chanson tradition where the words matter as much as the melody. "Padam, padam" arrived in 1951, near the peak of her fame.
Her own life was as dramatic as her material, marked by grief, car accidents, addiction and illness, and she died in the south of France at just 47. More than sixty years later she is still treated as a national treasure, and her recordings remain one of the best ways to hear French sung with absolute clarity of feeling.