Métis In the Mainstream: The Ambivalent Blackness and Legacy of Henri Salvador

ABSTRACT

Existing studies of musical blackness in France either focus on inter-war jazz or on post-1990 rap and “urban pop.” This article bridges the gap by studying the songs and career of Henri Salvador (1917-2008), a singer and guitarist of Guadeloupean origin who successfully transitioned, in metropolitan France, from the 1930s fashion for Creole music to mainstream pop in the 1950s and beyond. His success as a métis or mixed-race artist straddled racial stereotyping and abstract Frenchness, revealing complexities around race that problematize the relevance of blackness and métissage (French-style multiculturalism) for framing the work of Black pop musicians in France.

KEYWORDS:

• Mainstream
• blackness
• Henri Salvador
• métis
• variétés
• chanson

Introduction

In November 2021, the African American dancer, actress, and singer Josephine Baker (1906–1975) was symbolically transferred to the Panthéon necropolis in Paris to commemorate her service to the French Republic. In his speech, President Emmanuel Macron deplored the racial stereotypes that had made Baker famous in the interwar years, when she appeared nude, sexualized, and animal-like, explaining that she was now celebrated for her anti-racist activism. This, he felt, embodied the true spirit of French republicanism since Baker was “a Black woman defending Black people but, first and foremost, a woman defending the human race. … She was motivated by universalism, placing the unity of all humanity and the equality of all before individual identity” (Macron). Worthily declaring the President’s attachment to antiracism in the context of a reelection campaign, this speech only mentioned Baker’s race in order to hitch it to, and dissolve it within, the French republican status quo. Not unexpectedly, Macron re-affirmed race-blind universalism as the only suitable frame of reference for understanding (and containing) racial difference in France.¹

The panthéonisation of Baker points to an unresolved tension around the place and meanings of Black and Afro-descendant identities in France, where insisting that racial minorities are part of the nation runs parallel with the fear that acknowledging their specificity, as a socio-racial group constituted by the historical trauma of slavery and wider racism, runs the risk of fragmenting national cohesion. This reluctance to address race as difference, however, makes it all the more urgent to expand research on France’s “Black condition” (Ndiaye), and this article offers to contribute to this area by re-narrativizing French popular music through the critical lens of blackness. It highlights and problematizes the success of Henri Salvador (1917–2008), a singer and guitarist of Guadeloupean origin who was the only Afro-descendant artist in metropolitan France to successfully transition from the interwar fashion for Creole music, to mainstream pop in the 1950s and beyond. Focusing on Salvador bridges the gap between existing studies of musical blackness in France, either concentrating on the interwar years (Tournès) or on post-1990 rap and “urban pop” (Béru; Malela).

Salvador’s near contemporary Josephine Baker barely released any new material during the postwar years, remaining forever tied to her colonial roles in the popular imagination. By contrast, Salvador was mainly active in the postwar, decolonizing period of the 1950s to 1980s, escaping exoticism by diversifying his output and winning the hearts of a multigenerational audience. A shrewd businessman, he set up his own record label and embraced television entertainment, achieving huge commercial success during his lifetime. At the time of his death, he was lionized as the foremost ambassador of Afro-Latin music in France (Fléchet 138).

Salvador was a Métis or mixed-race man, whose pale complexion could make him pass for white. Appearing to have little interest in a collective Black experience, he closely aligned with French republican universalism on one level, which certainly facilitated his rise to stardom. Yet Salvador was also an Antillais musician in metropolitan France, who had to contend with the racist stereotypes that preceded him, who consciously parodied white conceptions of Afro-Caribbean identities, and who was torn between his aspiration for recognition and a pragmatic sense of entrepreneurialism. Performing diverse and sometimes competing versions of musical blackness, he was artistically and perhaps fundamentally “Black” in the sense that his racial minority status constrained aspects of his artistic work and reflected many of the social patterns shared by his Antillais peers.²

Salvador has been sidelined from the canonical history of French popular music, however, both on account of his mainstream status and, we argue, on account of his race. The critical discourse that dominated French music culture at the height of his popularity posited that the only legitimate representatives of “French” popular music were poetic singer-songwriters who rejected, supposedly subversively, foreign influences and the mass market (Looseley 77). Tellingly corralled under the banner of chanson française (French song), these heroes of “national authenticity” happened to all be white. Yet there have always nonwhite performers outside of chanson, in the so-called French mainstream, albeit not very many and rarely for long. The Malagasy yéyé group Les Surfs had a string of hits in the early 1960s; the Ivoirian-French baritone John William was successful in 1966 with “La chanson de Lara,” his adaptation of Doctor Zhivago’s theme tune; in 1976–1977 the Martinican David Martial frequently appeared on prime-time television performing his hit “Célimène,” backed by two dancers; the Antillais band La Compagnie Créole stayed in France’s Top 10 chart throughout 1983–1987, each of their singles selling between 400,000 and 600,000 annual copies. But they and other Black mainstream artists have never been the subjects of scholarly enquiry, and nor has Henri Salvador whose own success preceded and extended beyond them all.

Shifting the focus to the mainstream challenges the elitist and chauvinistic framework that produced the pop/chanson dichotomy, and reveals racial biases that, despite hiding in plain sight, have impacted the modes of operation of Black musicians in France. Placing racial minorities center stage, in the middle of dominant music tastes and practices, will illuminate the ways in which the careers and outputs of Black pop musicians are intertwined with notions of prestige, authenticity, and vulgarity.³

To do this, we first contextualize the uses and limitations of the notion of blackness for the study of racial minority musicians in France, before charting the evolution of the French mainstream and the opportunities, however limited, it offered them. We then analyze a handful of songs by Henri Salvador which expose his multivalence as an Afro-descendant artist, navigating tropical exoticism, sensitive homage, and unracialized abstraction. We conclude by questioning Salvador’s legacy today, since the space he carved out remains a battleground for contemporary Black artists. Throughout, we cite the French record sales and chart positions compiled by Fabrice Ferment on behalf of the Syndicat National de l’Édition Phonographique (Top France, SNEP), and data from the French state television archives held at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) in Paris.

Blackness and French Racial History

Paul Gilroy famously defined the notion of blackness as premised on the somatic perception of black skin, while also being, like all cultural identities, “the outcome of practical activity: language, gesture, bodily significations, desires” (102). Meanwhile, Stuart Hall has insisted that theorizing blackness takes into account the collective and political action of Black artists who have been historically marginalized, stereotyped, and fetishized, in order to examine their access points to the “rights of representation” that might challenge this Western discourse (449). When applying the notion of blackness to popular music, and bearing in mind musicologists’ epistemological hesitations around the category “Black music” (Tagg), a dual process of musical blackness arises. On the one hand, there is the ability of artists of whatever race to evoke a perceived Black condition, explicitly or not; on the other, there are Black-identifying artists whose self-conscious creativity typically seeks to confront a history of domination.

The relationship between these two types of blackness, symbolic representation and physical presence at the risk of over-simplification, is particularly fascinating in the popular music mainstream but articulated differently in France from in the US. In the US, the term “mainstream” was adopted in the 1950s by the music industry as a fluvial metaphor to identify the process of greater flow between hitherto separate, though never entirely watertight, music genres and audiences. Three centuries of slavery and many decades of segregation had produced a separate “race records” category in the 1920s for Black performers, but this gradually disappeared in the 1950s as urbanization and racial liberalization grew, in conjunction with the development of coast-to-coast radio broadcast and the commercialization of vinyl records. Upwardly mobile Black artists could now record on white music labels, while Black musical innovations such as blues, jazz, gospel, and later soul, featured almost everywhere in a “rambunctious aesthetic free-for-all” (Zak 137). From the 1950s onwards, the US music mainstream collectively identified the songs with the greatest level of commercial success, those bought and enjoyed by the largest audience possible (Grenier and Guilbault 223), and that expansion was fundamentally enhanced and problematized by blackness.

In France, the popular music mainstream also developed in the 1950s, also thanks to the commercial development of vinyl and new media, and it was also characterized by ethnic and stylistic eclecticism. However, its conceptualization and practice had little to do with a Black presence, and a lot more to do with cultural gatekeeping and conceptions of the “popular.” Specifically, intercultural hybridity or métissage can simultaneously be understood as a sign of nonracist openness or of indiscriminate vulgarity, depending on who performs and how. This conundrum requires careful contextualization.

France was a colonial empire until after WW2, with its territories in the Antilles and Réunion becoming integrated overseas departments in 1946, and its territories in West and Central Africa, and in Madagascar, collectively gaining independence in 1960.⁴ Until then and despite some migratory flows since at least the 18^th century, metropolitan France was an overwhelmingly white place, where racial segregation was never implemented (at least officially), and where slavery never occurred since it was entirely confined to the colonies (Ndiaye). Unlike the US, then, metropolitan France did not have a large Black population for the best part of the 20^th century, and its music industry did not segregate or target its customers by producing “race records.”

From the late 19^th century onwards, small numbers of Black elites from West Africa and the Antilles started studying in France, giving rise in the 1930s to the influential anticolonial movement of Négritude. But as a group of avant-garde, experimental, and Communist-sympathizing poets, the Black activists of Négritude had relatively little traction during their lifetime, mainly achieving popular recognition posthumously, when their complex works became included in the French school curriculum (Ternisien). Outside of these elite circles, France’s Black population grew in small spurts in the 1920s and 1940s when Antillais soldiers, recruited for service in both world wars, were allowed to remain after demobilization (Negrit 95), and when students and workers escaped unemployment in the Antilles. Yet France’s Black population only grew substantially from 1960 onwards, when the BUMIDOM work scheme actively recruited Antillais, and post-independence agreements encouraged West African migration. Numbers were modest at first: Antillais were estimated to represent less than 0.3% of the French metropolitan population by 1970 (Ndiaye 192), and West Africans even less than that by 1981 (Ndiaye 203). During the 1980s, however, France saw a significant rise in the permanent settlement of its Black population, as the economic downturn in the Antilles worsened and the regrouping of African families was legalized. Today, Black people in the métropole officially represent 5 to 6% of the national community (Ndiaye 426), although this number is likely an underestimation.⁵

Another key difference between the French and US contexts is the extreme ethnic, linguistic, and legal diversity of France’s Black population, who do not necessarily share the direct heritage of slavery (in the case of Africans), and who migrated with the privileged status of French citizens in the majority case of Antillais since 1946–1948. Many diasporic associations were set up in France throughout the 1960s-’70s, but this pattern subdivided rather than reinforced the common experience of migration (Negrit 109). Moreover, like most ethnic minorities, Black people in France tend to appreciate the French republican model of citizenship that guarantees them a minimum legal equality relative to their white peers (Ndiaye 285; Dicale, Maudits 36). Indeed, the constitutions of the Fourth Republic (1946–1958) and the Fifth Republic (1958-present) enshrined racial equality in law following the trauma of Vichy, with the consequence that the French state considers any form of racial distinction as discriminatory. Reformulated as race-blind universalism, this “abstract” discourse has filtered through many, if not all, sectors of society, and even as French citizens of all races justifiably criticize the limitations of this theory, most find it difficult, if not downright counter-productive, to conceptualize identity along racial lines. A general mistrust of the self-contained and potentially divisive undertones of the term “Black” is widespread in France, and while this attitude may be motivated by a dash of anti-Americanism, it is also a sincerely felt, if culturally acquired, belief in the virtues of universalist legislation and thinking (Ndiaye 285).

All this is not to say that racial discrimination does not exist in France, on the contrary, but that racial diversity became, in the period of study (1950s-’80s), both an increasingly obvious social fact and a discursive taboo (Tin). While the state and French people proudly affirm their non-racism, many white citizens are reluctant to comment on the socio-economic domination of racial minorities, and to recognize paternalism as an insidious form of racism (Ndiaye 428).

This paradox means that the “Black condition” in France, to the extent that it can be generalized, is often characterized by misunderstandings and feelings of resentment. This experience is particularly problematic for mixed-race individuals, who are commonly referred to as Métis(se) in French, as noun and adjective. The French-Guadeloupean music critic Bertrand Dicale has explained that many Métis in France feel racially abused when the white population mobilizes their existence as evidence that racism no longer exists (Dicale, Maudits 68, 247). Their perception of inadequacy is compounded by the widespread use of “métissage” to identify, exclusively positively, cultural processes of hybridization. The problem here is that métissage has developed into a consensual and hedonistic shorthand for a nonracist France, despite this being a utopian fantasy and the term being inherited from colonial ideology (Yee 411). The celebration of métissage, then, hides a very French conceptual paradox as the word “glorifies the mixing of [racial] categories that [French Republicanism] simultaneously denies” (Yee 415).

Racial Diversity in French Popular Music

These problems have parallels and consequences in French music culture, where an overwhelmingly white profession is as passionate about diversity as it is blind to its own reproduction of social exclusion and racist stereotypes. Many studies of the interwar period rightly celebrate Paris as the home of a négrophile revolution, when Antillais musicians, mingling with African American jazzmen, invented the beguine for enthusiastic audiences of all races (Tournès). In the 1940s-’50s, the slight rise in migration saw the number of Antillais musicians grow in France, leading to a marked “tropical” fashion in clubs and on records (Cowley).

Nonetheless, this fashion was not as popular or nationwide as is often suggested. It was highly localized in Paris because most musicians played live at the time and depended for their livelihood on the presence of a sizable Black audience, itself concentrated on the capital. Their concerts also appealed to jazz fans of the white jet set, a similarly rarefied segment of the population. Relatively few opportunities for performance led to high levels of competition among Antillais musicians, and a general impression of “failure” despite the success of a lucky few (Negrit 106). Besides, musical careers were generally discouraged by migrant Antillais families, who aspired to more “respectability” for their children (Negrit 113). Musicians hailing from former colonies tended to have limited knowledge of music theory due to poor Conservatoire provision and found the entrance exam to the copyright syndicate SACEM, whose membership accelerates networking and economic development, extremely daunting (Negrit 110).⁶ In the media, with a state monopoly on radio and television broadcast until 1981, opportunities for “Black music” programs were rare. The Guadeloupean DJ and singer Gilles Sala led a radio segment on Antillais music between 1950-1953, on RTF, but it was only 30 minutes long and not regularly scheduled (Negrit 110). Between 1968–1971, the esteemed Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango hosted Pulsations on French TV, a program devoted to Caribbean and African music, but this was a half-hour broadcast past the watershed, only commissioned eleven times in four years (INA). This context was hardly equivalent to the R&B radio boom that transformed the US soundscape in the 1950s, and there were no Black-owned record labels and Black music producers working in the métropole at the time.

Meanwhile, theorists of the Négritude tended to disparage popular music and deplore the loss of “authentic” Antillais flavor in France, instead of encouraging its proliferation (see Paulette Nardal, qtd. in Cowley 248). More generally, with music criticism so central to career development in France, and uniquely dependent on literariness and publishing, Antillais musicians felt on the whole that they lacked popular representation. A handful were recognized as skilled jazzmen in Jazz Hot, France’s erudite magazine on the subject, but this appreciation did not filter through to the generalist press (Negrit 118). Rarely sharing the elitist bias against mass appeal, many Black singers and musicians would have gladly exchanged critical admiration for a few more gigs and sales. Unlike in the US, then, the French music industry, media, and cultural environment did not racially segregate between audiences or musicians, but nor did it generate many Black role models or facilitate Black-owned businesses.

Finally, and this is a key paradox of French music culture, composers, instrumentalists, arrangers, and singers were, ethnically speaking, remarkably diverse, their existence reflecting migratory patterns to France from Europe, the Southern Caucasus and the wider Mediterranean region. Among the most popular French artists of the second half of the 20^th century were first- and second-generation migrants from Belgium (Annie Cordy, Johnny Hallyday), Italy (Yves Montand), Egypt (Dalida, Claude François), Turkey (Dario Moreno), Armenia (Charles Aznavour), and Poland (Jean-Jacques Goldman). In turn, this diversity produced one of the most dynamic and unpredictable music blends of the 20^th century, with artists working across chanson réaliste, operetta, military march, any kind of “folk,” jazz manouche, tango, blues, rock, samba, bossa, reggae, etc. (Dicale, Ni noires 272). This diversity, however, is not the direct proof of wide-open métissage that is generally assumed, because it emerged in a context of socio-professional coherence and white domination. This métissage is of a fundamentally different kind to the Creole hybridity born of necessity in the Antilles, where it was triggered and sustained by the unexpectedly “fertile cataclysm” of slavery (Dicale, Ni noires 70).

For these reasons, Black musicians in France have been few in number and rather taken for granted, seen as contributing to another strand of diversity. Their relative lack of professional influence also explains the unchecked production of racist stereotypes in French popular music, from sexy doudous – Caribbean women—to hapless idiots. Those Black artists who made it in French popular music typically fitted into one of two white scripts: supposedly racially undefined universalism or friendly exoticism.

Now, this musical eclecticism also had its origins in the “variety show” of the music hall stage, called variétés since the late 19^th century. In the 1950s, when music halls were replaced by cinemas, the variety aesthetic moved to television and the most commercially successful popular music simply became known as la variété or les variétés, extending the practice and terminology for genre mishmash. Crucially, this aesthetic became devalued when literary critics, riding high on the avant-garde wave of contempt for consumer culture, spotted a new generation of French musicians who, in exactly the same decade, appeared to escape the pressure of capitalism and the fast-fashion of foreign imports. Indeed, the 1950s in France saw the emergence of solo singer-songwriters on small-stage cabarets, unusually full of anti-Establishment ambitions and poetic witticisms. Picking up on this originality, literary critics called it chanson française for its perceived indifference to foreign influences, and chanson à textes for its poetic complexity, extolling it as the new and only form of “national authenticity” (Looseley 63). Below it, in the symbolic pyramid of social distinction, stood the supposedly market-driven and amorphous variétés, highly mediatized and forever in thrall to foreign sounds.

That chanson songwriters feared commercial success or that variétés singers lacked finesse is easily disproved, yet this discourse held fast and was paradoxically solidified each time powerful variétés producers and media hosts disparaged, in public, “la variétoche” (Lebrun 66, 102, 286). Enmeshed in notions of authenticity and artifice, quality and vulgarity, this discourse attached chanson to individuality, destabilization, cynicism, and modesty, and frowned upon variétés for its supposed association with teamwork, comfort, comedy, and seduction. In this context, artists and sounds from minority backgrounds also fell into categories full of contradictions. In chanson, minority artists and musics could be admired as evidence of experimentation, while having few real professional opportunities; in variétés, they were actively encouraged while being subject to critical contempt; in both, they were confined to stereotypes.⁷ As an artist straddling both genres, Henri Salvador illustrates this double-bind.

Henri Salvador: Universally French, Specifically Antillais

Salvador was born in the French colony of Guyane in 1917, of mixed-race parents from Guadeloupe. His mother hailed from the tiny Carib community of Port-Louis, and his father counted at least one slave among his forebears (Dicale, Dictionnaire 604). Salvador’s father, employed by the French tax office in Cayenne, believed in professional integration and the emancipatory capacities of the French Republic. When the family emigrated to Paris in 1929, still a rare occurrence at the time, the young Salvador found it relatively easy to fit into his new surroundings as a pale Métis. Despite experiencing spells of “casual racism” during his military service around 1936 (Dicale, Dictionnaire 605), he identified as a Parigot [Parisian] throughout his life and remained totally unsentimental about the “homeland” of Guyane (Eudeline 30).

Restless in school, obtaining a basic diploma at age 14 in 1931, Salvador started busking the streets of Paris as a teenager, initially with comic acts taught to him by a professional clown, before learning jazz guitar from his brother and a cousin. From this point on, and despite his best efforts to cultivate an abstract Parisianness, Salvador’s trajectory became imbricated in socio-ethnic patterns of Antillais migration in France. Indeed, the clown who encouraged his first comic acts, nicknamed Rhum [Rum], had worked at Paris’s famous Medrano circus where Chocolat, France’s first Black clown, had started his own career in the 1890s (Noiriel 110). This connection is only anecdotal, but it points to a tradition of bonhomie and family-friendliness in the roles available to Black male bodies in French popular culture. The image of Black males as harmless buffoons was notoriously deployed in advertising for the chocolate drink Banania, sold since 1915 with the grinning face of a Tirailleur Sénégalais, or African rifleman, with a slogan in petit nègre (pidgin French). Symbolizing the inferiority of colonial subjects, the Banania stereotype was abhorred by anticolonial theorist Frantz Fanon (90), yet it endured throughout the 20^th century, signifying good humor and even interracial friendliness for its majority white consumers. Salvador, who sought success in comedy from a young age, partly adhered to this cliché while attempting—not always successfully—to challenge and undermine it.

Salvador’s early career was also helped by having musicians in his extended Antillais family, who were already active in the fashionable jazz and beguine scenes. His older brother André and his maternal cousin Roland Paterne were skilled guitarists by the time Salvador left school. Paterne had learned music theory with a private teacher (Bagoe), and his brother André introduced Henri to Django Reinhardt (Dicale, Dictionnaire 605), and to the Martinican clarinetist and cabaret-owner Ernest Léardée, to whom Salvador owed his breakthrough in 1935–1937 (Negrit 105). Performing live regularly by the time he was just 16, Salvador was also encouraged in this profession by Léona Gabriel, a family relation born in Martinique who, since moving to France in 1920, had herself become a singer, notably as part of Alexandre Stellio’s Creole orchestra in 1930–1931 (Cowey 248). Gabriel was married, between 1928–1933, to a white Frenchman and prolific composer of music hall tunes, Léo Daniderff, whose illustrious career in the French music business probably reassured the Salvadors. In any case, thanks to a supportive personal and social network of Antillais musicians, Salvador was propelled into the tight-knit milieu of the Paris jazz and Creole clubs, where his guitar and comic skills were in demand.

With the Nazi Occupation of Northern France, Salvador left for the South in early 1941 where he was noticed and hired by France’s most successful bandleader of the period, Ray Ventura (Dicale, Chanson 202). Ventura had built his popularity with a vast repertoire of jazz, exotica, and comic skits, but being Jewish, he soon left for Brazil in 1941, staying there until the end of 1944 with his big band, including Salvador. In Brazil, Salvador became the star attraction thanks to his comedy and somatic appearance: imitating Popeye the Sailor Man in between songs, he was a hit with Brazilian audiences who, apparently, identified with his “sun-kissed” skin color (Eudeline 32).

Back in France after the war, having grown in confidence, Salvador sought a solo career as a singer in the broad Afro-Latin genre that encompassed calypso, mambo, rumba, cha-cha-cha, and French-style samba (Fléchet 120, 134), realizing that his skin color, Antillais origin story, and recent time spent in Brazil all authenticated his approach to this repertoire. In 1948, his first solo record was the 78rpm “Maladie d’amour” [“Heartbreak”], a beguine performed by Léona Gabriel before the war (Cowley 251). When re-orchestrating it, Salvador removed the “classic” Antillais sound of brass section and percussions, and considerably shortened the instrumental intro. Instead, he foregrounded his own guitar-playing and crooning voice, sounding a lot more modern than the high-pitched vibrato of Gabriel. What the song now lacked in suitability for the dancefloor, it gained in terms of phonographic experience—a cozier track perfectly suited to radio broadcast and domestic listening. Salvador’s “Maladie d’amour” sold well, simultaneously honoring the Antillais repertoire by keeping the bilingual Creole-French lyrics, and appealing to audiences less familiar with, or keen on, the genre. Following this first solo success, the producer Jacques Canetti came knocking on the door and Salvador duly “professionalized” himself, successfully applying to the SACEM as a composer (1949) and lyricist (1952), each time endorsed by musicians who worked closely with Ventura (SACEM).

Race is, of course, only one aspect of Salvador’s rise to success, but he and his producers—variously at Polydor, Philips, Fontana, and Barclay—understood that his visible appearance as a Métis could be a professional asset. As he adapted, composed, and sung variously “tropical” songs in the 1950s, the majority of his record covers showed a close-up of his face, in effect “starifying” him for immediate recognition. Sometimes holding a guitar that indicated his musicianship, he mostly appeared wide-eyed and grinning broadly, occasionally wearing a white suit reminiscent of Cab Calloway’s. Together with an abundance of Caribbean clichés in the lyrics (sweet women, lovely islands, sunshine, farniente), these signifiers racialized his repertoire even if critics never commented explicitly on his race. In 1958, Salvador released for Barclay a series of EPs and albums all entitled Dans mon île [On my island]. These featured on the back cover a long piece by Henry Jacques, a member of the Académie Charles-Cros, an institution set up in 1947 by music critics and publishers to promote “daring” and “poetic” songs thanks to annual prizes. For Jacques, the Caribbean dimension of Salvador’s music (Trinidadian calypso, Creole mazurka) was an opportunity to celebrate the “French carelessness” of the 18^th century, when pre-revolutionary France had been a colonial empire. According to Jacques, Salvador epitomized

… un mélange d’insouciance heureuse, de vivacité spirituelle qu’à travers le temps [il] a retrouvé pour en faire son attitude, … la gentillesse française d’un enfant poète et musicien des îles. … Fidèle à ces airs d’autrefois, Henri Salvador, avec des chansons nouvelles, continue pour nous la tradition. Décidément, dans l’île de Salvador, la plus belle, la plus sérieuse des occupations est de bien vivre à ne rien faire. Si nous prenions le bateau pour aller là-bas ?”

[… A mixture of happy carelessness, of witty vivacity which [he] has recaptured across the ages and adopted as his own, … the French sweetness of a child-poet and island musician. … True to these old-time tunes, Salvador’s new songs continue the tradition for us. Ultimately, on Salvador’s island, the most beautiful and yet serious occupation is to live well and do nothing. How about catching the next boat over there?”]

There are no references to race in this endorsement, but plenty of paternalist tropes about “island natives” (childlike, idle, naturally musical), an explicit geographical binary between “us” and him, here and “there,” and the unshakable certainty that pre-abolition life in the colonies was not only “sweet” for all, but a mood worth recapturing in late 1950s France. By praising Salvador and his “island” music, this chanson critic implicitly wrote a nostalgic manifesto for colonialism.

Elsewhere, and this is problematic for different reasons, Salvador’s compositions and performance were considered archetypally “French.” In 1954, his Polydor album Salvador chante ses derniers succès was endorsed by the conservative novelist André Maurois, a member of the prestigious Académie Française. In the past, Maurois had cheerfully promulgated racist stereotypes in a colonialist textbook introducing young readers to the “happy islands” of the Antilles and the “beauty” of local women (Maurois 3). Here, however, Maurois complimented Salvador’s “sensitive and delicate” songs, “caressing voice,” and “witty and humorous” lyrics, without any reference to ethnic origin. Instead, with an empty rhetoric alluding to an imprecise yet collective experience, he claimed that Salvador encapsulated “the very essence of our times,” forcing a veneer of high culture onto the singer via his own aura as homme de lettres (intellectual).

A similar erasure of Salvador’s origins, and of his original contribution to French music, is apparent in the reception of the Latin jazz lullaby “Le loup, la biche et le chevalier,” which he composed in 1950. Also known as “Une chanson douce,” this is arguably Salvador’s most enduring and endearing contribution to French popular music, a song firmly ensconced today within France’s proud repertoire of nursery rhymes (Dicale, Dictionnaire 604). Re-released multiple times in the 1970s, it signifies nostalgia and comfort for many French children born in that decade, including this author. In 1970, the liner notes of its Fontana release only praised Salvador’s “authentically poetic voice,” foregrounding the track’s poeticity (lyrics by Maurice Pon) while ignoring the subtle Caribbean orchestration composed by Salvador. Indeed, accompanying the guitar throughout are the delicate vibrations of a güiro, a gourd-like percussion found all over the Caribbean and which, in this instance, evokes the faint buzz of crickets. Because this choice is incongruous alongside the lyrics recalling European fairy tales (with mention of a forest, doe, wolf, and knight), it lends the song its lingering and mysterious charm. But flagging this orchestration and the singer’s origins in public discourse might have encouraged a better appreciation of Caribbean contributions to French popular music, instead of assuming that “French song” was a timeless and stable entity, and Salvador a French singer ex nihilo.

In his musical and performing choices, then, and in relation to the ambient critical discourse, Salvador straddled an ambivalent racial space where his Antillais identity could simultaneously be essentialized and overridden, generating both identification among the French Caribbean diaspora, and paternalistic curiosity or indifference among the white majority. In his own declarations, Salvador was mostly silent on the issue of race, but he occasionally ruminated essentialist generalizations about himself and others. He claimed, for instance, that his own tendency to laugh loudly instinctively reproduced “the ample laughter of the Antilles” (Minisky and Rémila 83), and that poor Brazilians were always happy thanks to round-the-year sunshine (Eudeline 30). Equally, while most of his musician colleagues failed to notice, acknowledge, or care about his race and origins, some foregrounded them, including the pioneer of chanson-jazz fusion Charles Trenet who called him, apparently affectionately, “le petit nègre” [“little Negro”] (Dicale, “Personal”). In what he said and what others said about him, Salvador encapsulated a widely shared French position on race, at once subtly aware of racial difference and remarkably insensitive about its social context and connotations.

“Calypso-hoaxes” and Racial Irony

Between 1950–1959, Salvador closely collaborated with the novelist and jazzophile Boris Vian who, as a lyricist, wrote sixty songs for him, about half Salvador’s output that decade (Tournès 302). Vian, a white upper-class Parisian with immense influence in postwar existentialist circles, supported the African American jazz diaspora in Paris and generally empathized with the “black rage” of African Americans in the racist South (Braggs 137). As a leftist intellectual, music critic, and broadcaster, he despised the “soul-crushing capitalism” of the music industry, while desperately seeking, and usually failing, to achieve commercial success himself (Braggs 148). Vian’s intellectual outlook extended to a binary conceptualization of race in popular music: regarding the US, he essentialized blues and jazz music as authentic expressions of a Black “soul,” and detested rock and roll whose sudden success evidenced, for him, the white commodification of a uniquely African American anguish (Vian 57, 171); regarding France, Vian felt that the variétés trend for exotica bowed to easy profits, churning out maudlin “stupidities” full of stereotypes (Halimi 51).

Vian was full of contradictions, however, if not sometimes downright disingenuous. He argued, for instance, that the only exception to the general French rule of musical mediocrity was Georges Brassens, a white artist of chanson à textes who captured, in his view, a “bluesman” sensibility thanks to his slightly delayed vocal onset and general “freshness of tone” (Vian 180)—clearly a case of the “white liberal idealisation of the ‘Afro’” (Tagg 294). In 1958, Vian became the artistic director of Fontana, a French branch of Philips expressly set up to develop a variétés catalog. His main hit that year was “Sans chemise, sans pantalon” [“Without a shirt or trousers”], a traditional Antillais dance tune which, adapted and sung by the Guadeloupean-born Gérard La Viny, celebrated the nudity and fickleness of Caribbean women. With it, Vian cashed in on the kind of exotic “stupidities” he otherwise despised.

When Vian and Salvador met in 1950, their collaboration was mutually beneficial. Vian’s novels sold poorly and copyrighting lyrics for a popular singer became his financial lifeline. Salvador, for his part, greatly admired Vian’s erudition and enthusiastically adopted his mentor’s high-brow preference for derision, irony, and pastiche (Eudeline 34). Indeed, Vian considered that the only way for him to pursue an ethical career as a lyricist, while being ontologically unable, as a white man, to play authentic jazz, was to use the high-art weapon of intellectuals: irony. As a result, Vian invited Salvador to sing what he called “contre-âneries” or “counter-stupid” songs, whose merit lay in parodying existing hits in order to denounce their triteness (Halimi 51). From his perspective, Vian was rescuing Salvador from the tropical stereotypes already associated with his name—here a case of what might be called white saviorism—but whether he felt successful is difficult to ascertain. Apparently, Vian frequently nicknamed Salvador “le titi de la Guadeloupe” [“Paris lad from Guadeloupe”], thus recalling his colonial background (Minisky 53), while conveniently avoiding to mention him in his acerbic deconstruction of French popular music published in 1958, other than to vaguely praise his polyvalence (Vian 76).

Irony is a famously difficult tone to get right, while ironically encoding racial stereotypes in 1950s France was possibly not the most pressing task. Yet, embracing the same antiracist and anti-variétés intentions, Vian and Salvador released dozens of “calypsos-canulars” or “calypso-hoaxes” (Halimi 49), which parodied the Afro-Caribbean vogue to which Salvador elsewhere contributed. Musically, these songs were perfectly on-trend and masterful, often performed by the best musicians during memorable studio sessions, briefly under the direction of Quincy Jones at Barclay in 1958–59 (Eudeline). Lyrically however, they refused the sentimentality of their models, and only recycled Caribbean stereotypes—sunshine, idleness, seduction—in order to underscore their absurdity.

The song “Je peux pas travailler” [“Sorry can’t work”] (1958) illustrates the pair’s subtle intentions yet at times confused effects. Penned by Vian, the lyrics reel off excuses mumbled by a work-shy narrator, who finds a predictable solution to his problems: lying in bed, he will look after “the lovely interior” of pretty Julie. This is on one level a traditional bawdy French song, arguably given some depth by its anti-productivity stance. On another and more problematic level, this song references colonial bodies through two stereotypes, the lazy Black man and “the womanizing Negro” (Burton 159), explicitly mentioning the plantation in the lyrics (the narrator cannot pick cotton due to his bad back), and implicitly situating the scene in the Caribbean, thanks to Salvador’s polyrhythmic composition with percussions that include congas, bongos, timbales, and güiro. The accumulation of Black signifiers, then, is supposed to outline the artificial and performative nature of stereotyping itself, encouraging listeners to deride the “conventional” (i.e. racist) production of blackness in French popular music, while admiring the confidence of this Antillais performer in tackling prejudice.

For André Halimi, a literary critic who influenced the chanson/variétés dichotomy by systematically railing against exotica and extolling Georges Brassens, there was never any doubt that Salvador bore the hallmarks of high quality Frenchness with his ability to manipulate irony. He considered Salvador a subtle songsmith thanks to his association with Boris Vian, who distanced him wittily from the general banality of “tropical” music (Halimi 46–56). Nonetheless, the comic reappropriation of racial stereotypes always risks “casting oil on the fire” of prejudice, by letting stereotypes cohabit intimately with their critique (Rosello 19). This risk was arguably greater here since, in this and most songs written by Vian for Salvador, Salvador was required to perform with an exaggerated “island accent.” Intended to mock simplistic conceptions of Black characters, Salvador’s singing alternated with “comic” vocal effects, including the liberal use of retroflex -r’s, a simplified syntax, idiotic laughter, hiccups, mumbles, mouth noises, and sudden shouts of mock pain or excitement (“Aïe aïe aïe!”).

Now, such vocal gestures are core elements in the Afro-Creole male culture of stylized braggadocio, in which participants demonstrate their self-control during semi-explosive banter sessions (Burton 159). In the US, similar effects belong to the “signifyin(g)” toolbox of African Americans, who hint at historical trauma when addressing a substantial Black-identifying audience, generating community cohesion (Gates). Among the Antillais diaspora of France, and perhaps the wider population, these features delighted those who sensed Salvador’s capacity for cultural send-up and self-derision (Dicale, ”Personal”).

Nonetheless, in mainland France where the majority audience was and remains white, such island-set “hoaxes” were problematic given the absence of consensus around what constituted racist stereotypes, or the necessity to lampoon them. Instead of exclusively being perceived as a skilled ironist, Salvador’s racialized performance also came across as “naturally” fitting the role of harmless Black jester (Rosello 19). There is only a thin line between firsthand and secondhand “stupidity,” and the context in which Salvador trod that line was restricted and restrictive for Black people. Furthermore, given that both sides of his Antillais persona, the clichéd one and the ironic one, often featured on the same records, disambiguating his intentions was practically impossible. His 1957 Philips album, for instance, was programmatically entitled Sous les Tropiques [In the Tropics], and while it included three tracks penned by Vian, it also featured, rather reverentially, a selection of “Antillais folklore” songs. The montage on the front cover also juxtaposed two types of Antillais identity, with a background photo showing anonymous dancing couples, all Black, reminiscent of Parisian Creole clubs like La Canne à Sucre where Salvador himself partied (Cowley 133), and an insert in the middle showing a grinning Salvador in a flower-printed shirt and straw hat, mock-embracing a Black woman. While nodding to the important socializing role of Creole clubs in Paris, this montage performed a bawdy Creoleness for laughs, potentially comforting white audiences in their colonialist fantasy: Black bodies as fun and sensual.

The Mainstream Comedian

Boris Vian died unexpectedly in June 1959, and while Salvador continued to release a few songs written by him before his death, he embraced variétés entertainment fully from this point on, diligently steered in this direction by his wife and co-producer Jacqueline Garabédian (of Armenian-Egyptian origin), and by his new lyricist collaborator, the white Frenchman Bernard Michel (a hugely prolific songwriter previously connected with Ray Ventura). Salvador completely gave up live performance in 1960 to concentrate on studio recording and television. In 1964, he launched his own production label Rigolo [So Funny], in effect becoming France’s first “independent” artist, releasing nearly 800 tracks, about half his own compositions. As television extended the aesthetic of the music hall stage, Salvador found it “very easy” to become a “super mega star” in that period (Eudeline 36), simply building on his existing skills across music and comedy. Between 1960–1970, he appeared on French TV at least 120 times (INA), always in prime-time programs like Discorama, Âge tendre, and his own-hosted show, Salves d’or, running from 1968 to 1977. In addition, Salvador produced fourteen music Scopitones, earning the title of France’s most creative artist in this short-lived medium (Scagnetti 115, 122).

With visual impact now central to his work, Salvador expanded his vocal clowning to facial grimaces and costumes, impersonating stock characters such as doctors, priests, cowboys, aliens, babies, and women, as well as ethnically marked “African,” “Chinese,” or “Mexican” men. Largely specializing in family-friendly songs and TV shows, he negotiated a lucrative deal with the Disney studios which granted him exclusive rights over their film soundtracks for the French record market (Eudeline 51). Now only occasionally evoking the Caribbean in his compositions, he was most successful when deriding French national and social preoccupations supposedly common to all. In 1964, “Zorro est arrivé” [“Here comes Zorro”] parodied American country-western music and satirized French children’s fascination with US television series. It became France’s fourth best-selling single that year with over 400,000 copies sold. In 1965, his military march, “Le travail c’est la santé” [“Work is good for you”], mocked consumerism and productivism, ironically so since it, too, sold over 400,000 copies. In this period, Salvador capitalized on a very “French” form of cynicism toward the music business, producing tracks that supposedly appealed to popular taste—comic exaggerations, bawdy jokes, musical diversity—while privately dismissing them as “rubbish” (see below). He was similar in this respect to Serge Gainsbourg, another collaborator of Vian who despised French variétés while searching for the elusive pop hit (Trottier).

Salvador, however, could never quite shake off the Antillais identity that already belonged to his star image and musical signature. He had the “ambiguous status of insider-outsider” (Rosello 9), French and Other, racially abstract and Métis, and despite his universalist intentions he conveyed multiple and sometimes contradictory “Black” meanings, especially when presenting as a comedian. Mimetic comedy is a well-known counter-stereotyping tactic for minority groups, thriving in an “exuberantly triumphant” and “resolutely upbeat” mood (Rosello 18). Like the “signifyin(g)” vocals mentioned above, the comedy performed by racial minorities enables minority audiences to mock the simplistic roles they are usually subjected to, but it is highly dependent on its context of reception. In France, Salvador’s mainstream comedy couldn’t help but simultaneously challenge and reinforce racial stereotypes.

This point is well illustrated by “Faut rigoler” [“Laugh out loud”], a cha-cha-cha composed by Salvador with lyrics by Vian which rehearse the well-known history lesson that the Gauls were the only “true” ancestors of the French. Each stanza describes a Gaulish cliché (blond mustaches, druids, barbarian invaders) and the simplistic chorus commands us to “Laugh out loud” before the sky falls, a supposedly Gaulish fear. Basic narratively, the song’s raison d’être is its juxtaposition of Gaulish ancestry with Caribbean music and Salvador’s Antillais performance, singing here with an “island accent,” which is supposed to absurdly denounce an equally absurd national myth—the Gaulish myth had recently been mobilized by the Vichy regime with catastrophic consequences. Released in June 1960, the song uses Antillais stereotypes to laugh not at the silly protagonist, but with him at the incoherence of over-simplistic patriotism. Its anti-Fascist and anticolonial undertones are fairly bold.

In 1961 however, Salvador released a Scopitone that muddied the message, while achieving greater success thanks to the unexpected overlap of the song’s Gaulish theme with the Astérix comic strips, which had themselves become popular since their first publication in October 1959. The Scopitone of “Faut rigoler” is set in a fake Antillais village, shot in a studio with straw huts and background palm trees. A dozen actors, all Black, dance barefoot and laugh around a large and imperturbable woman, grinding something in her lap; all wear recognizable Antillais costumes while children run around bare-chested. Reminiscent of the “native” village scenes from the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris, the Caribbean stereotype is completed with the appearance of Salvador in a large straw hat, grinning and fooling around, rolling his eyes and hysterically laughing throughout.

On the one hand, this song and its film propose that Caribbean rhythms (the lyrics also mention the mambo) can coexist happily with the French joie de vivre inferred from the Gaulish context. Just as the Astérix stories mock any ethnic group and close around a banquet scene, so this song invites audiences to rejoice in the protagonist’s excess and uphold inter-ethnic camaraderie (métissage) in the face of chauvinism. On the other hand, the original intention to denounce the absurdity of France’s Gaulish myth is undermined by Salvador’s visual appearance as an “Antillais,” seemingly blending with his surrounding and childlike excitement. Had he dressed like Astérix, the pastiche might have been obvious. As it was, the Scopitone was at best naïve, at worse ill-judged and falling back on colonial tropes.

Another song, “Le lion est mort ce soir” (1962), produced a similar effect without even relying on comedy. This is Salvador’s cover of the South-African inspired “The lion sleeps tonight,” popularized in the US by the white doo-wop group the Tokens (1961). Of the six versions released in France in 1962, Salvador’s was the only one with French lyrics, which he penned, while all the others were instrumental. Given that the American original relied on vocal harmonies between five singers, it was a surprising choice for a solo performer like Salvador, but the motivation for this cover seems to have been his ability to connote nonwhite Otherness in an implicitly “authentic” manner. Adapting the lyrics in French, Salvador kept the reference to the “mighty jungle” and the Zulu-inspired chorus “oh Wimoweh,” de-familiarizing his French audiences or, rather, re-familiarizing them with a mental image of “Africa.” Meanwhile, he expanded the connotations of colonial Otherness by appearing, in a short film for television, in a décor of straw hut and palm trees entirely similar to that of “Faut rigoler” the year before. Barefoot, wearing rolled-up trousers and a short-sleeved printed shirt, Salvador holds the hand of a Tahitian-looking girl, with sleek black hair and wrapped in a shoulder-less dress, who kneels adoringly before him. Without a lion in sight, without doo-wop vocalizing, this is a slow-moving romantic song performed in an unusually high-pitched voice for Salvador, who moves across a series of “tropical” signifiers homogenizing South Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. The dominant connotation is of fluid and unmenacing blackness, musically graceful and symbolically grateful for Western validation.

Reliable sales figures are not available for the year 1962, but Salvador himself confirmed the huge success of “Le lion est mort ce soir” in France and Western Europe, declaring that it “paid the mortgage” (Eudeline 36). In fact, he detested that particular song (“Tu parles d’une connerie!” – “What bullshit!”) and called it, along with his other comic hits, mere money music, using an anglicism to underline his scorn (Dicale and Manoukian 204). Regretting his participation in mainstream pop, though glad of the financial comfort, he admitted owing his success to facile, “stupid” colonial fantasies, thereby validating the high-brow contempt for variétés while no longer attempting, since Vian’s death, to use his platform for derision.

Our final example of Salvador’s racial slipperiness is “Bouli-Bouli,” a B-side on his EP “Le travail c’est la santé” from 1965. Another adaptation, this was his version of Sam the Sham’s Tex-Mex novelty hit “Wooly Bully,” which had stayed twelve weeks in France’s Top 20 charts, from July to September.⁸ Rushing to release a parody in October, with lyrics by Bernard Michel, Salvador played on the chronological and near-homophonic proximity with the original, while giving it a new meaning. In French, “Bouli-Bouli” is meaningless babble but close to the slang phrase for distributing money, “(a)bouler.” This song is narrated by an enthusiastic African man welcoming his president back to “Black Africa” from France, where he has acquired generous funding. As the narrator shouts the name of the president, “Bouli-Bouli,” French listeners hear “Hand out the dosh,” or similar. Lyrically, this is an unusual, even courageous, evocation of Françafrique, the post-colonial French-African relations that are characterized by greed and corruption. Nonetheless, the clashing music and Salvador’s erratic vocals tend to thwart a political interpretation. The repetitive name of the president, unfortunately, evokes the racist use of the syllable “boul-” in French, as in the slur “bamboula” and the character “Boule de Neige” from the racist comic Tintin au Congo (1946). Mimicking a contextually “African” voice, Salvador uses the tired clichés of petit nègre (pidgin French) by dropping his -r’s and addressing the president with the impolite “tu,” in a slightly different pronunciation to his “island accent” elsewhere. Strained and screaming, his voice contributes to the overall chaotic effect, as the fast-paced blues-rock music gets overwhelmed by violent crash cymbals, irregular hand claps, and distorted sax solos.

To be sure, Salvador’s histrionics are narratively coherent given the celebration of African one-upmanship against the ex-colonizer, and sonic chaos is a traditionally immersive experience in African and Afro-Caribbean music cultures (Maultsby 96). Nonetheless, given the generic “African” setting of the song, and its success among a mainly white audience at the height of Salvador’s mainstream stardom, these signifiers tend to reinforce the colonial view of “Africans” as excitable and incoherent—another problematic representation of blackness for this artist.

Salvador’s Legacy

Salvador’s cheerfulness and consummate stagecraft meant that he remained a much-loved artist throughout the 1970s, still making brief appearances in the 1980s and 1990s. As a rare example of a Métis singer, he prefigured the chart success of Laurent Voulzy, Stromae, and Gaël Faye, who explored with great acuity their own Métis identities in post-colonial France and Belgium. As an Antillais comedian—also rare at this time—he encouraged the careers of Pascal Légitimus and Lucien Jean-Baptiste who, as youngsters, admired his assurance on TV (Minisky and Rémila 91). As a fan of Afro-Latin and African American music, Salvador also typified the generalized absorption by French artists of all races of music genres from the other side of the Atlantic—a trend that continues apace.

Yet Salvador leaves a more problematic legacy in his lighthearted take on racial identity, which arguably facilitated the circulation of outdated notions of blackness in France for too long. In 1985, when he was guest of honor at the Victoires de la Musique, France’s televised music awards, French singles in the Top 10 included Thierry Pastor’s “Sur des musiques noires” [“Set to Black music”], a naïve ode to inter-racial fraternalism; “Ethiopie” by Chanteurs sans frontières, France’s all-white answer to U.S.A. for Africa; Julien Clerc’s “Mélissa,” a Caribbean-flavored invitation to ogle a naked Métisse; and “Cho ka ka o,” a novelty song by Annie Cordy performed on primetime television with children in blackface. Regardless of the context that explains this sudden surge in explorations of blackness (domestic antiracism campaigns and wider music-led humanitarianism), the success of these tracks epitomized a very French problem: the compatibility of well-intentioned métissage with racist stereotypes. The persistence of such paternalistic forms of “racial diversity” helps explain the vehement rejection of French “pop” models of blackness by a new generation of Black and ethnic minority artists who, coming of age in the late 1980s, embraced the more explicitly racialized, more politically anticolonial, representations found in African American rap (Béru). While Salvador is not single-handedly responsible for this, studying his trajectory certainly highlights the professional opportunities and restrictions shaping the careers of Black musicians in France.

But Salvador’s career didn’t just dwindle and stop in the 1980s. In 2000, aged 83, he made a surprise comeback with the album Chambre avec vue, driven by the hit single “Jardin d’hiver.” To his immense satisfaction, this became the most commercially successful work of his career, selling one million copies in France and another million worldwide (Eudeline 71). If it captured a nostalgic mood by being partly modeled on other comeback albums (Johnny Cash’s American Recordings, 1994; Buena Vista Social Club’s eponymous album, 1997), it was also his most critically acclaimed work. The album and the singer won in their respective categories at the 2001 Victoires de la Musique, and elite critics writing in Les Inrockuptibles, Télérama, and Le Monde, all felt that it crystallized, at last, Salvador’s “authentic” self (Minisky 71).

This professional accolade was due to Salvador evincing, for the first time across a whole album, his usual tendency toward eclecticism and comedy. Instead, stewarded by Keren Ann and Benjamin Biolay, a team of much younger collaborators developed a coherent sound at the intersection of bossa nova and cool jazz (Rémila 77). With lyrics riffing on the metaphor of life’s journey, the songs were overwhelmingly introspective, without any hint of exoticism or “island accent.” This approach was unanimously admired as “elegant,” to Salvador’s great pride (Dicale and Manoukian 209). What is more, some journalists went so far as to claim that Salvador’s compositions from the 1950s, which echoed throughout this album, had influenced Antônio Carlos Jobim—the official “father of Brazilian bossa nova” – and thus indirectly originated bossa itself (Eudeline 30).

Asserted with confidence, these claims were necessarily selective, but they settled Salvador’s cultural meaning once and for all, as a cosmopolitan artist typifying France’s aptitude for métissage, and a major French player in the world history of popular music. While confirming that farce and prestige aren’t good bedfellows, they established that a singer’s persona is not forever tied to a single act (comedy), connotation (clown), or race (Antillais, Black, Creole). Indeed, by praising Salvador as the key connector in the international development of a major music genre, crucially not a “Black” one, these claims epitomized the “widespread and intentionally joyful movement” of musical métissage, as perceived through a white Western lens (Dicale, Ni noires 52). Their appraisal of Salvador decentered race, celebrated Frenchness, and refused to engage in debates over the reproduction of racism in the French music industry.

In his study of Antillais music during and since French colonization, Dicale proposed an admittedly crude five-stage model to understand musically Creole identities (Ni noires 45–80). Initially uprooted, musicians meet a “white master,” undergo acculturation, experience self-hatred and never quite settle in their careers due to deep feelings of ethnic maladjustment. Salvador is Creole to a large extent: he left Guyane for France aged 12 (uprooting), worked closely with Boris Vian in his thirties (“white master”), adopted his mentor’s high-brow contempt for variétés (acculturation), and expressed regrets, if not quite shame, at embracing the lucrative business of crass comedy for years. Nonetheless, Salvador also firmly escapes the Creole model since, in his final years, he enjoyed a professional happy ending, with the consensual “settlement” of his musical and racial meanings.

Overall, the concept of blackness is productive when it reevaluates racial diversity and racism in (French) music culture, spotlights Afro-descendant artists, and critically examines the power relations that shape their songs and careers. However, Salvador’s example shows that blackness, while crucial, is just one theoretical template among others for the study of racial difference in French popular music, given that the artist himself did not interpret his career exclusively along racial lines. While the term métis and the process of métissage remain problematic alternatives for discussing racial diversity in France, racial minorities deserve to be understood from as many critical perspectives as can be coherently combined. By outlining the problematic career of Salvador, this article hopes to inspire future studies, blending the insights of the French and Anglophone traditions on this issue.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Isaac Milhofer and Carlos Maldonado for the musical analysis; Danick Trottier and Denis-Constant Martin for their useful feedback on early drafts; and, above all, Bertrand Dicale for his precious, if cautious, encouragement.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2024.2366114.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barbara Lebrun

Barbara Lebrun is Senior Lecturer in French Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester, UK), a specialist of the cultural history of French popular music. Her work is mainly focused on the tensions between critical prestige and commercial success, and the musical representation of cultural identities (gender, ethnicity, race, age …). She is the author of two monographs, Protest Music in France (Ashgate 2009), which won the IASPM Book Prize in 2011, and of Dalida. Mythe et mémoire (Le Mot et le Reste, 2020). She is also the editor Chanson et performance (L’Harmattan 2012), the co-editor with Catherine Strong of Death and the Rock Star (Ashgate 2015), and the author of numerous articles and chapters. See the full list of publications here: www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/researchers/barbara-lebrun(e50245bf-3b95-48dd-b40f-e165f17e46c2)/publications.html.

Notes

1. At the time of preparing this article for publication (April 2024), the controversy surrounding the opening of the Paris Olympic Games by the Franco-Malian singer Aya Nakamura rehashes the same issue. While supporting Nakamura, Macron still privileges a “dissolution” of blackness by proposing that she covers Edith Piaf rather than perform her own repertoire.

2. Following Cowley (264), the adjective “Antillais” refers here to population hailing from the French Caribbean or Antilles (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane).

3. Looking for blackness in this context involves focusing on metropolitan France, the economic center of French-language music production and consumption, and the center of political decision-making and dominant values. Henceforth, the noun “France” will refer to the French métropole where the majority population is white, while always implying a (post-)colonial relationship with its (ex-)colonial territories.

4. After a brutal struggle, Algeria would be the last colony to gain its independence in 1962.

5. This figure was calculated in 2007 by a French survey institute on behalf on the Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires de France, CRAN, but it has not been reliably updated because French citizens, including racial minorities, tend to reject racial categories; this skews the data (Tin).

6. In the 1950s, this included written evidence of at least six musical creations, support from two SACEM-registered referees, and a composition exam on a set theme, in notation not performance (SACEM).

7. For a demonstration of the co-existence of racial curiosity and racism in chanson, see the analysis of the album Gainsbourg Percussions (1964) by Trottier.

8. On the widespread practice of US song adaptations in France in the 1950s-’60s, the indifference (and lack of knowledge) with which the racial identity of the original singers was received, and the reinforcement of a sense of white French superiority in this process, see Lebrun (89–92).