Someone mentioned to me that "Ste. Jean-Bap'st" is coming up on the 24th, so French Canadian music has been going through my head. Though my family is Irish Catholic, there was no Irish parish in my town so we went to a French Canadian church. I'm old enough to remember when the feast day of St. John the Baptist was really celebrated among some French Canadians in some towns in New England, especially among those whose origins passed through Quebec. That was in the generation when a mixed marriage where I come from meant an English speaking Catholic marrying a Yankee protestant, and when it was a French speaking Catholic marrying a Yankee, well, in some circles, it was about as welcome as gay marriage was about twenty years ago.
I'm also just old enough to remember some old folks listening to 78s of La Bolduc, I had no idea who it was they were playing but I remember the music. The younger folks listening to Edith Piaf and Yves Montand, there was actually French language commercial radio programming around here back then. La Bolduc went through a bit of a re-birth when a collection of her complete recordings was issued in the 1990s which was when I first had a name to put with the music.
Chez Ma Tante Gervais
Je M'En Vais au Marché
Les Femmes
Quand J'étais chez Mon Père
Jean-Baptiste Beaufouette
Another site with lots of information about La Bolduc is at Collections Canada. The mp3s are from the Virtual Gramophone which has about her entire discography, oddly enough, cataloged under Bolduc, Édouard.
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