"Le Grand Johnny" and days gone by

Fifty years ago tomorrow, on 14 March 1960, French singing idol Johnny Hallyday's first recording "T'aimer follement" ("Crazy in Love with You") was released.  It launched his career.  On occasion he would inevitably be referred to as the "French Elvis."   He has two major connections with Switzerland, apart from being very popular here generally.  He was born Jean-Philippe Smet, but anglicized his first name to "Johnny" and took the name of his aunt's husband (or his cousin Desta's boyfriend -- accounts differ), American dancer Lee Halliday (also a pseudonym) for his stage name.   According to the local paper, Lee Halliday was also a translator at the UN in Geneva at one time.  The second connection is that, since 2006, Johnny has had a permanent residence in Gstaad, Switzerland.

Whatever his relation to Lee, Johnny's name became "Hallyday" once and forever when the record editor printed his name with a "y" instead of an "i."  And why does his career resonate with me?  For one thing, he was born in 1943, my own birth year.  But it is also because when I first heard him sing (a recording only), it was on my first major stay far away from home.  It happened while I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco in the early 60s.

The song that I first heard was his rendering of "Noir c'est noir" (Black is Black), played over and over again along with songs by other French idols who were popular at the time such as the great Charles Aznavour, Sylvie Vartan (who was Johnny's first wife), Mireille Mathieu, France Gall and Françoise Hardy.  All are more or less of an age with me ... still.  But "Noir c'est noir" resonated most at the time because I already knew the tune and I was badly homesick.

Noir c'est noir

Il n'y a plus d'espoir

Oui gris c'est gris

Et c'est fini, oh, oh, oh, oh

Ça me rend fou j'ai cru à ton amour

Et je perds tout

Je suis dans le noir

J'ai du mal à croire

Au gris de l'ennui

Et je te crie, oh, oh, oh, oh

Je ferai tout pour sauver notre amour

Tout jusqu'au bout

We were ALL much younger in those days, much more naively hopeful about what life had in store for us.  I was a first-year teacher of English as a Foreign Language in a Moroccan secondary school.  Our school director thought that it would be more proper for the three young unmarried women who taught at his school to room together.  He was not alone in that thought.  Because I was the lone American for miles around, I ended up rooming with my two French colleagues.  Both were named "Jeannine," although the two used different spellings for the same name.  The names may have been convenient to remember but they also caused confusion.  The "Jeannines bis," ("double Jeannines" or "Jeannine ditto") as they became known, each had self-contained classes for the most part and their students were younger.  Mine were primarily young men rather than adolescents, and were quite a handful.

One roommate was from Saint-Malo in Brittany and the other was from Béziers in Languedoc.  In one fell swoop, I was thus treated to different French geography, different customs, different accents and totally different points of view.  One was petite and brunette and the other was tall and blond.  Tall and blond Jeannine loved to tell how when she first reported to the school, two weeks after my own advent, everyone told her how much better her French was than that of "l'autre américaine."  Despite all her protests that she was French, her tall blondness clearly was the "American" stereotype of the era, so most in the school kept right on believing that she was an American, but one who could actually speak good French.   I owe whatever fluency I have since obtained in that language largely to their combined and concentrated good graces and seemingly endless patience.

There are many good memories I have of the year that we all spent together, but those that remain with me most are the many, many hours spent listening to the valiant little phonograph on which we constantly played those 45 rpms by French singers.  I eventually learned several songs by heart and grew to love them.  Even now, whenever I hear one of the tunes or the names, my memory flies back to those years of hope when life was before me and nothing was impossible.

Johnny too has aged a lot since those days, but he still can pack the crowds into his concerts.  May that continue for as long as possible!