This is part of a series of posts detailing the recreation of each song in Mémère’s Notebook, including their historical roots, various versions in print and field recordings, analysis of Elisa’s rendition, the process of researching the melodies, transcribing and translating the French lyrics, and the eventual arranging, performing and recording of these old Acadian folksongs for a modern audience.
Chère Leonore, by many other names, appears to be one of the oldest and most widely shared of the Acadian Complaintes found in Mémère’s Notebook. A Complainte is a type of folk ballad commonly found in the Acadian repertoire, often characterized by an epic tale of tragedy told in stanzas of matched couplets known as strophic form, often ending with an ironic twist, or with a moral to the story. This one is no exception, and shares another common theme in Acadian ballads—that of a young woman left alone by her soldier boy as he goes off at war. In this oddly humorous telling, the young man’s bit of “advice” to his lover is to find solace in the arms of other boys in his absence. It’s hard for me to imagine my sweet and devout Mémère even joking about such a thing! Yet there it is, along with many other bawdy and hysterical lyrics in this amazing collection. Thus it’s up to us to figure out what our ancestors were trying to tell us by keeping this story alive through an oral tradition that stretches as far back as the 19th century.
Online Resources:
Among the many titles given to this song, here are a few:
- Adieu donc ma chère nanon
- Belle Nanon
- J’ai fait une maîtresse
- Un Matin Je me lève
- Je me lève au l’aurore du jour
Click on the title above to find the resource I used to research that version.
Contemporary Recordings:
As you can see, there are myriad versions past down through the generations. Here are some versions that were recorded and released in France during the 70s and 80s:
The above versions have a distinctive modal character, owing to the drone of the hurdy-gurdy and the épinette des Vosges. This style hearkens to the medieval troubadour music that likely was the progenitor of many of these ballads. Indeed, some of these songs can be traced directly back to occitan chansonniers, and new trad musicians in the 20th century often looked back to early music in search of the purest forms of folk heritage style. My personal search was more focused on what I soon discovered is known by anthopologists as the “autochthonous” melodies—the ones from the place of the notebook itself. The more I searched in field recordings from places like the Archives Acadiennes at the University of Maine Fort Kent the closer I got to the version I imagine my Mémère must have heard in her head when she wrote these old songs down from memory. One thing is clear from comparing her lyrics to other versions I have found: these are passed down from memory, in the grand tradition of oral history and folklore. There is no one “standard version” but rather a living, evolving heritage of songkeeping.
Field Recordings:
Joseph T. Larade. Chéticamp, NB. 1957. Vocal with fiddle and foot-stomping accompaniment. B-mixolydian mode. From the Beaton Institute in Cape Breton. This is the first recording of the song that I heard, and remains the primary source for my version, along with the sheet music from the Chiasson collection. The first verse features the characteristic “half-measure” of 3/8 that defines many later renditions.
Louise Desgagnés. Saint-Irénée, Quebec. 1916. This is from a wax cylinder in Marius Barbeau’s unparallelled collection of French folksongs at the Musée d’histoire Canadien in Ottawa. Vocal a capella in D-ionian mode with an opening couplet that suggests a dominant tonality that is typical of the genre. A transcription of this recording appears in Barbeau’s songbook “Le Rossignol Y Chante” p.88
Sephora & Louise Amirault with Mme Henri Pothier. This appears in a 1956 Folkways Records release of Acadian Songs from Pubnico and Grand-Étang from the Helen Creighton Collection. Creighton created dozens of field recordings and published transcriptions of many in her seminal 1989 work Fleur des Rosier. This recording underscores the unusual rhythm of this ballad, sung in unison by three women without missing a beat. The dorian melody is similar to many contemporary recordings of the song.
Sheet Music Transcriptions:
… and here are my takes, in French and English, over the years…
my transcription in the songbook:
