{"id":8193,"date":"2011-06-01T11:01:57","date_gmt":"2011-06-01T15:01:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=8193"},"modified":"2019-09-23T10:54:44","modified_gmt":"2019-09-23T14:54:44","slug":"midweek-music-break-josephine-baker-and-jai-deux-amours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2011\/06\/midweek-music-break-josephine-baker-and-jai-deux-amours\/","title":{"rendered":"Midweek Music Break: Josephine Baker and “J’Ai Deux Amours”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Froog posted the other day on great movie songs<\/a>, taking inspiration from the American Film Institute’s (AFI’s) “100 Years – 100 Songs<\/a>” list of 2004. He pointed out some strange omissions (even considering the raw list of four hundred nominees<\/a> from which the hundred were selected).<\/p>\n

I’m not much surprised that no songs from the soundtrack of 1991’s Henry & June<\/em> made either list. (It was probably considered a non-American and maybe even “non-fictional” film, violating some of the criteria listed at the foot of this page<\/a>.) A pity. No matter what you thought of the film’s NC-17 rating — the first ever! — or of its caliber as<\/em> a film, the music which accompanied everything onscreen was (I thought) a model of how to match musical sensibility to a particular film’s time, place, and “feel.”<\/p>\n

Nowhere does this match seem truer than in the recording of Josephine Baker’s “J’Ai Deux Amours” (“I Have Two Loves”) which closed the film.<\/p>\n

It made a canny signature song for Baker in general, and (sixty years later) for Henry & June<\/em> in particular. The title — in English, “I Have Two Loves” — cuts in several directions at once. The “two loves” (per the song’s lyrics) are not human<\/em> loves but geographic and cultural ones: “my country and Paris.” Baker herself was a black American who utterly bloomed<\/em> in pre-World War II France, especially Paris. Still, says Ethan Mordden’s The Guest List<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n

Baker’s two loves were not, as one might think, America and Paris. The number was introduced at the Casino de Paris, in 1930, in a scene laid on the African shore, where Adrien Lamy played a French colonist who wants to take native girl Baker back to France. Composer Vincent Scotto and lyricists G\u00e9o Koger and the Casino’s producer, Henry Varna, wrote this number for Baker as a woman torn between Paris and Africa. Further, to the French, “mon pays” means “my province” as much as “my country.” Thus, Baker’s two loves never included America.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But even without the full lyrics, “things” are happening with the title alone:<\/p>\n