1931 Birth of Georges Dor
After the British conquered New France in 1759 during the Seven Years’ War, they decided to let the inhabitants keep their French language, Catholic religion, and civil law, partly as a counterweight to the restive English-speaking colonies to the south. This allowed the Québecois to develop a unique culture, as distinct from the rest of Canada as it was from France.
In the 1950s and 60s, this culture became self-consciously aware and aggressively separatist, producing writers, composers, and singers who were proud to flaunt their indifference to American and Canadian artists. This was particularly marked among the singer-songwriters known as chansonniers, such as Gilles Vigneault, Pauline Julien, and Georges Dor.
Dor was a radio disk jockey and news director who wrote poetry in his spare time. In 1968 he penned his masterpiece “La Manic”, a love letter from a lonely worker in the north of Québec labouring on the Manicouagan power project. It rose to the tops of the Quebec charts and even captured the fancy of Anglophone prairie boys a thousand miles to the west. He sings it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RzMhqbrkY
Its beginning in French goes:
À la Manic
Tu m’écrirais bien plus souvent
À la Manicouagan.
Je recrée ton âme et ton corps
Je te regarde et m’émerveille
Je me prolonge en toi
Comme le fleuve dans la mer
Et la fleur dans l’abeille.
Mon jardin, ce n’est pas un jardin, c’est la plaine
Mon chemin, ce n’est pas un chemin, c’est la neige
Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver.
[…] Gerry Bowler’s March 10th post looks at the 1931 birth of Quebecois folk singer and chansonnier Georges Dor. […]