Word: gassion
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...from the misbegotten of the meanest quartier to the most refined boulevardiers. Jean Cocteau, who died within hours of Piaf, called her a genius: "There has never been another like her . . . and there never will be." He compared her to a nightingale, but the impresario who discovered Edith Giovanna Gassion at 19, singing on the corner of a Paris avenue, had bestowed a more fitting name: Piaf, which in the city's argot of the 1930s meant sparrow...
...owner heard and hired her. He dressed his tiny discovery in a simple black dress and changed her name from Gassion to Piaf-argot for "little sparrow." The scrawny singer with the hoarse, throbbing voice that seemed far too powerful for so small a source was an instant success. Soon all France was listening to her tender, shamelessly sentimental songs...
Divorced. Edith Piaf (Parisian argot for sparrow; real name: Gassion), 41, birdlike (4 ft. 11 in., 91 Ibs.) French cabaret singer (La Vie en Rose); from Jacques Pills, 48, French songwriter; after 4½ years of marriage, no children; in Paris...
Piaf (real name Gassion) tries to explain in English that when she first started singing as a spindly child in the streets of Paris "I cried . . . cried, without tears. You understand?" What she means is that she bawled her songs. Even now, France's famed chanteuse needs no microphone; she sings out, nasally, a little as if she were singing through a papercovered comb. But with her infallible feel for beat and flow, Piaf fans find it pretty exciting...
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