Le jour de clarté by Graeme Allwright (Vinyl record album review)

Album name: Le jour de clarté

Artist name: Graeme Allwright

Year: 1968

Number of discs: one

Label: Mercury

Collection: Brenner / Gessner

Who owned it: my mother, the family’s only Francophone.

Buy the CD on Amazon: $11.99

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I have no familiarity at all with Graeme Allwright or this record.

What I expected

It’s in French, and it’s from 1968, and it includes songs by Leonard Cohen; Peter, Paul and Mary; Pete Seeger and Tom Paxton. So folk.

What it was actually like

This was pretty good, and I considered it the best of the three French-folk records from my mother’s collection so far – the other two being Garlick by Hugues Aufray (1972) and Une Selecton “La Fine Fleur” by Jacques Bertin (1964). I still felt like Ghost Dog while listening, though, and since I have no Haitian glacier friends, I doubt that my French will ever improve from its current state.

In any case, French Suzanne was a very faithful representation, and French The Stranger Song (L’étranger) was the same way. Though I consider Suzanne the quintessential Leonard Cohen song, I would not necessarily know the latter, but from the first bars, it sounded extremely Leonard Cohen, and I immediately felt like I was listening to Songs of Leonard Cohen.

The French What Did You Learn in School Today? (Qu’as-tu Appris A L’école) also stood out as mimicking its original singer Tom Paxton eerily well.

Of the others, I thought Jusqu’a La Ceinture was quite fun, and Ne Laisse Pas Partir Ta Chance was a most pleasant surprise – a bluegrass song! I never would have thought that bluegrass would appeal to the French taste in music.

Grade

4/5: would listen again