Writer of Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, Edith Piaf’s anthem to France
Charles Dumont, who wrote the music for Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, the soaring song about sweeping away the past to find love anew that the hallowed but troubled singer Édith Piaf turned into an anthem of French culture, has died at his home in Paris. He was 95.
Dumont had a prolific career, writing melodies for the likes of Jacques Brel, Juliette Gréco and Barbra Streisand and music for French television and film. In the 1970s, he embarked on an award-winning career as a romantic crooner.
Charles Dumont on the set of TV show Les Grands du Rire, 2009.Credit: Getty Images
Still, it was the roughly 30 songs that he, with the lyricist Michel Vaucaire, wrote for Piaf – the diminutive and radiant chanteuse known as the Little Sparrow – that, by his own admission, defined his career.“My mother gave birth to me, but Édith Piaf brought me into the world,” Dumont said in a 2015 interview with Agence France-Presse.
Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (“No, I Regret Nothing”), introduced in 1960, became a definitive song for a definitive French singer, a woman who became not just a global star but also a cultural ambassador for her country.
With its martial solemnity, the song had the feel of a patriotic anthem, which gave power and drama to lyrics that express, in blunt and defiant terms, a rejection of past memories, both good and bad, while moving toward a new future.
Edith Piaf and Charles Dumont on the Champs Elysees, 1961.Credit: Getty Images
The song powerfully captured Piaf’s own perseverance through a troubled life that included being abandoned at birth and raised in a brothel, only to endure adulthood marked by personal calamities, physical ailments, and drug and alcohol use before her death at 47 in 1963.
Unlike Piaf’s life, the song ends on an upbeat note, as its protagonist resolves to discard past romances to find new love.
“I wanted something grandiose, something revolutionary, something that would make me famous,” Dumont recalled in a 2003 interview with the British newspaper The Independent. “I played the notes, and Vaucaire just started saying ‘rien de rien,’ and it became a song about the triumph of love, the everlasting hope of love.”
Such a glorious outcome, for both the songwriters and the singer, seemed highly unlikely in October 1960, when Dumont and Vaucaire dropped in on Piaf’s home on Boulevard Lannes in Paris’ exclusive 16th Arrondissement, hoping to finally sell her a song after multiple rejections.
At 44, Piaf was racked by pain after a car accident and expressed little apparent interest in returning to the stage – certainly not with a song by Dumont, whom she had previously dismissed as “a mechanical songwriter of no great talent,” he recalled in a 2010 interview with The Independent.
That day, Piaf’s secretary had already informed them that the meeting was cancelled when the singer piped up in a weary voice from her bedroom and agreed to see them. It took an hour for the frail figure to emerge, Dumont said, and when she did, she told them. “I’ll hear only one song – just one.” Dumont raced to the piano and began belting out Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, which he and Vaucaire had written with Piaf in mind.
“When I finished,” he said in 2010, “she asked, rather rudely, ‘Did you really write that song? You?’ Then she made me play it over and over again, maybe five or six times. She said that it was magnificent, wonderful. That it was made for her. That it was her. That it would be her resurrection.”
Composer Charles Dumont at the piano with Édith Piaf.Credit: Getty Images
Charles Gaston Dumont was born on March 26, 1929, in Cahors, a commune in south-western France, before his father, a boilermaker, and his mother, a coffee roaster, moved the family to Toulouse, 112 kilometres to the south.
An early fascination with Louis Armstrong steered young Charles to jazz, music he dared play only in secret during the German occupation of France, given the Nazi decree that it was degenerate music.
After World War II, he trained as a trumpet player at a music conservatory in Toulouse before moving to Paris to carve out a career. His trumpet-playing days ended with damage to his throat after a tonsil operation, so he turned his attention to organ, piano and songwriting. He teamed up with Vaucaire in 1956.
In December 1960, Piaf took the stage at the Olympia Concert Hall in Paris and performed Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien for the first time. She also performed other songs by Dumont and Vaucaire, including Mon Dieu and Les Flonflons du Bal.
Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien became a chart-topper in France and was eventually covered in more than a dozen languages, including in English as No Regrets, recorded by Shirley Bassey and other singers. In 1962, Dumont collaborated with Piaf on writing Les Amants, which they sang together on record.
After Piaf’s death in 1963, Dumont and Vaucaire routed La Mur, a song they had written for Piaf about the building of the Berlin Wall, to Barbra Streisand, who included it in 1966 on the album Je m’appelle Barbra, on which she sang mostly in French. Dumont also wrote the scores for many movies, including Jacques Tati’s acclaimed 1971 comedy Traffic.
Starting in the early 1970s, Dumont also made his mark as a solo artist, releasing a string of albums.
He won a Prix de l’Academie Charles-Cros music award in 1973 and earned gold status for Une Chanson (1976) and Les Amours Impossibles (1978). In 2012, he published a memoir, Non, Je Ne Regrette Toujours Rien (“No, I Still Regret Nothing).”
In addition to his daughter, Sherkane, he is survived by his partner, Florence Lemaître; two sons, Philippe and Frédéric; another daughter, Maricha Dumont; and six grandchildren.
Charles Dumont in concert in Paris, 1986.Credit: Getty Images
Despite his success, Dumont never could escape the shadow of his most famous song. Nor did he want to.
“I was reborn with that song,” he said in the 2010 interview with The Independent. “It transformed my life. It has been my calling card all over the world. It changed me from a jobbing songwriter, a fabricator of songs, to someone who had the confidence and the opportunity to write what I wanted and what I felt.”
The New York Times