Photo: Lucille Dumont Photography Date: November 11, 1963 credit is CBC Still Photo Collection/Roy Martin Cutline: Singer Lucille Dumont is shown in a 1963 photo. Lucille Dumont helped popularize the chanson style in Quebec and was a beloved broadcaster and singer, who had many up-and-coming artists on her TV programs.Roy Martin
In 1935, Lucille Dumont sang the first of her countless broadcast performances, over the airwaves of a Montreal radio station. More than half a century later, she sang on Quebec television with the young Céline Dion.
Ms. Dumont, who died last month at age 97, was revered by several generations of Quebeckers as the grande dame of chanson – the popular art-song form that was developed in France and given new scope by a post-war generation of Quebec songwriters. She played a key role in the patriation of the genre, which became one of many cultural manifestations of the province's Quiet Revolution.
She was born on Jan. 20, 1919, in Montreal's Centre-Sud, a district which, then as now, knew more than its share of poverty. She was just 16 when she made her broadcast debut.
Outside the realm of folk music, most popular singers in Quebec at the time imitated American or French singers, and did French or American repertoire. During the first part of her career, Ms. Dumont followed suit, singing chansons that were popular in Paris, and modelling her performance on French stars such as Lucienne Boyer and Lys Gauty. Like them, she sang with expressive diction, a quick vibrato and a melting, lyrical style that could make a simple phrase feel like a caress.
Under her mentor, Léo Le Sieur, an organist and composer who guided her into broadcasting, Ms. Dumont quickly became a star in Quebec. She sang and acted as host on numerous programs on Montreal radio station CKAC, an early media-convergence play by La Presse. She often performed with the station's own orchestra.
Her talents were also showcased through a variety of shows at Radio-Canada, with titles such as Variétés Françaises, Sur les boulevards and Le moulin qui jazz, the title of which riffed on a 1934 hit song for Ms. Gauty. On stage, Ms. Dumont starred in musical revues at Montreal's Monument-National and other theatres.
In 1945, she became the first performer of Insensiblement, a chanson by French songwriter Paul Misraki that was later recorded by Jean Sablon, Charles Aznavour and jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Two years later, she signed a recording contract with RCA Victor, and eventually released dozens of albums, though few achieved anything like the notice she gained through her broadcasts.
In 1952, she appeared on Radio-Canada's first TV broadcast, on a program called Le Café des Artistes. A series of regular performing and hosting gigs on TV followed. For four years in the late 1950s, her weekly variety show À la Romance directly followed the Saturday night hockey game, whose colour commentator was her sportscaster husband, Jean-Maurice Bailly. By that time, she had honed her TV performance skills to a captivating degree. She coddled each song with her warm, expressive voice, and beguiled the camera with a smile or a wink in mid-phrase.
At about the same time, she was turning her attention to Quebec chanson, giving a platform in Quebec and abroad to the work of young talents such as Gilles Vigneault, Jacques Blanchet and Stéphane Venne. In 1957, her performance of Blanchet's poetic Le ciel se marie avec la mer won first prize at the Concours de la chanson canadienne. It became her signature song.
"She promoted Quebec writers and composers at a time when that wasn't an obvious thing to do," composer and friend Normand Racicot told Le Devoir after her death. "That wasn't as au courant in the 1960s as it is now."
Some of Ms. Dumont's Quebec chansons made proud reference to the province and Montreal in their lyrics and titles. She had lasting success with René Tournier's Mon Saint-Laurent, si grand, si grand and Blanchet's Au parc Lafontaine, a tribute to the historic park in Montreal's Le Plateau-Mont-Royal district. Both were waltzes performed with lavish orchestral arrangements.
Quebec chanson, with its sophisticated themes and melodic finesse, stood apart from the wave of youth-oriented, beat-heavy music reaching the province from the United States and England in the early 1960s. But chanson as a Quebec creation served as a point of cultural pride, and had an effect on the character of the province's popular music that lingers to this day.
Ms. Dumont remained a fixture on Radio-Canada till the mid-seventies, performing and hosting French stars such as Mr. Aznavour and Jacques Brel. In 1968, she opened a studio, Atelier de la Chanson, and continued teaching into old age.
She was regularly feted in Quebec as a national treasure. She became an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1999, and entered l'Ordre national du Québec in 2001. Though she was mainly an interpreter of song, she received a legacy award from the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2006.
Lucille Dumont, who died on July 29, leaves her sons Sylvain Bailly (Suzanne Dubois) and Martin Bailly (Sylvie Dufour), and grandson Jean-Martin (Alexandre Ménard).
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