ABSTRACT
Georges Brassens was a lover of poetry, a devourer of obscure poetic anthologies from the local lending libraries, and had acquired a considerable, largely self-taught knowledge of literary culture. By the time he died in 1982, Georges Brassens had become an improbable culture hero, a symbol of the typical Frenchman, of the authenticity of la France profonde, universally admired and respected, and some ten years later the myth is alive and scarcely diminished. Brassens succeeds in imposing them in his concerts, in front of a broad-based audience, and on his records, although even today they are rarely programmed on the radio. A striking feature of all Brassens's albums was the inclusion of texts by established poets sung as popular songs. It is rather a question of bathos, the use of high-flown language in a low-life context, reinforced by the rudimentary gruffness of Brassens's musical style, and his marked meridional accent.
