Depression-era singer back in the spotlight
The Depressionera housewife who became Quebec’s pioneering singersongwriter is back at centre stage, more than 75 years after her death.
A new film has opened about the life and career of the girl known as Mary Travers at birth, Madame Édouard Bolduc upon her marriage and La Bolduc after achieving fame among French-speaking audiences in Quebec, northern Ontario and New England.
The movie La Bolduc has received mixed reviews, but it is introducing a new generation of music lovers to an innovative performer who elevated the everyday struggles of her time into art.
“She had tremendous success in the 1930s, especially during the Great Depression, because the songs she was composing and performing were basically about how to get through the difficulties of these times,” said Serge Lacasse, a music professor at Université Laval in Quebec City.
Bolduc sang about the aches and pains of sleeping on the hard floor, mosquito bites after a trip to the country, dealing with a jealous husband, shopping on credit at the corner grocery store and the headaches of her nosy landlord.
Her most famous and enduring song is the 1930 hit, “Ça va venir découragez-vous pas,” which urges people not to lose hope in the face of widespread unemployment.
“She laughs at the fact that her shoes have holes in them, that there’s no heating. All this with a Québécois accent. It makes it both funny and encouraging because people identified very strongly with what she was saying,” Lacasse said.
The film, starring actress Debbie Lynch-White, casts Bolduc as an early feminist in spite of herself.
Director François Bouvier told Montreal newspaper Le Devoir that, in his view, the singer “wasn’t so much a feminist without knowing it as without wanting it.”
“She believed in the values of the time and never identified as a feminist,” said LynchWhite, who went through a long period of intense study to develop the character, of whom there are no film records.
“If she hadn’t had a musical career, she would have been a housewife like all the women of her time. But life took her elsewhere and ended up clearing the way for others.”
Bolduc was born in the Gaspé town of Newport, Que., to a French-Canadian mother and an Irish father, who gave her what would be her only musical instruction on the violin and harmonica.
As a teen she was sent to Montreal to work as a housekeeper.
She married Édouard Bolduc, a labourer, and the couple had four children. Music was in her blood, but Bolduc only stepped onstage out of necessity — to support her family during her husband’s illness.
She was spotted performing in a cabaret show by Quebec City music producer Roméo Beaudry, who signed her to a deal that had her producing two original songs a month and selling thousands of discs as well as sheet music.
One of the defining characteristics of her songs is the use of turlutage, a singing technique similar to Irish lilting or skat — a skill most likely passed down by her father.
“Her music was the traditional Québécois music that came to us from Ireland and it was dancing music,” said Lina Remon, an independent researcher from the Gaspé town of Grande-Rivière, Que., who directed a 1994 Bolduc documentary, D’la morue, des turluttes et des chanson.
Later this month, Remon is also reissuing a book she wrote in 1993 that examines Bolduc’s body of work.
“When we hear the songs of Madame Bolduc we feel like getting up and dancing because it’s dance music. Everyone overlooks that.
“I think people fixate on the lyrics in saying that she spoke about misery and this and that,” Remon said.
Lacasse is also on the Bolduc bandwagon. He recently released Remixer le Québec, an album that began as an academic project, giving modern, remixed takes of classic Québécois songs, including three written and recorded by Bolduc.
“You could almost see her while listening to her. You could hear her smile or laugh or being happy,” he said.
From Bolduc’s success was born a French-Canadian recording industry that allowed Quebec artists to sing how they spoke rather than striving for a more European-accented French, Lacasse said.
“This is a secondary effect that was so important. She had such success that they started to record many other people.”
Bolduc’s career, though not her popularity, was hobbled by a1937 car accident while touring near Rimouski, Que. She took an entire year away from the spotlight recovering. She was later diagnosed with cancer, which ended her life in 1941. En scène is a monthly column on Quebec culture. Email: