The first time I became aware of something like a revival in traditional music in France was when I first heard Alan Stivell sometime in the early nineteen seventies. A copy of his Renaissance of the Celtic Harp and A l’Olympia have been in my collection in various formats ever since. Of course Stivell is intensely connected to Brittany rather than France as such, but that distinction took a while to sink in to me as a young teenager.
One of the players in Stivell’s early band on the A l’Olympia album was Gabriel Yacoub who left to concentrate more on French traditional music rather than Breton, and went on to form Malicorne with his then wife Marie. They made great music and one track I’ve liked since I first heard it is Marions les Roses.
I started to look the other day at where the song came from. Google wasn’t entirely my friend as all searches led back, one way or another, to Malicorne, but I did strike a bit lucky when I came across this, different, rendition by le Duo des Salins:
Unfortunately I haven’t yet tracked down anything about the performers or their arrangement, and in particular if they were working from a source or if they’ve just adapted the known version into their style. I suspect the latter.
So I started searching for particular lines of text thinking that, as the song is associated with children going door to door looking for eggs at Easter, I’d come across other references. Some of the lines turn out to be standard lines that migrate from song to song, but I did eventually end up with something I like a lot, Chançon de Mai by Patrick Mezellier and Rural Cafe. This is in Occitan not French and from Montpelier rather than Berry where the Malicorne version is said to originate. Again, though, I have no idea of the source or the arrangement.
On the face of it, the stanzas, wishing blessings on householders, tie to an ancient view of the start of May as a time for fertility rituals. The final stanza, though is a curse.
Mès, si nos volètz ren bailar
A vòstra poart’ anarem chiar
But if you don’t want to give us anything
We’ll shit at your door
As the children’s quest for eggs continues, so does mine for an early source for the words. It keeps me out of mischief.
One thing that did strike me, mind, is that the tune is reminiscent of a well-known Breton tune in Alan Stivell’s repertoire An Alarc’h. As an aside, I only had the good fortune to hear Stivell live once. By coincidence it was the only time I went to a Runrig gig and the only reason I went was because Stivell was the support act.
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