La Cuisinière is a song written by
Mary Bolduc
Mary Rose-Anne Bolduc, born Travers, (June 4, 1894 – February 20, 1941) was a musician and singer of French Canadian music. She was known as Madame Bolduc or La Bolduc. During the peak of her popularity in the 1930s, she was known as the ...
and released by the
Starr Record Company
Starr Records was a record label founded by the Starr Piano Company of Richmond, Indiana. Gennett Records was also owned by Starr Piano.
Starr's first discs were vertical-cut records in the mid 1910s based on Edison Records standard found in th ...
on her fourth record, alongside ''
Johnny Monfarleau
Johnny is an English language personal name. It is usually an affectionate diminutive of the masculine given name John, but from the 16th century it has sometimes been a given name in its own right for males and, less commonly, females.
Varia ...
''.
Although it was her fourth release, this was her first record to achieve any commercial success.
''La Cuisinière'' was very successful, selling twelve thousand copies in
Quebec
Quebec ( ; )According to the Government of Canada, Canadian government, ''Québec'' (with the acute accent) is the official name in Canadian French and ''Quebec'' (without the accent) is the province's official name in Canadian English is ...
, which was unprecedented sales for a record at the time.
The success of the song made Bolduc a household name in Quebec.
The song tells of the encounters of a domestic servant with various
suitors. The overall tone is humorous.
This follows a long tradition of French comedic folk songs dealing with rejected suitors. The lyrics are set in five versus, each of four lines.
Each verse ends with the phrase: ''Hourra pour la cuisinière''. The general rhyming scheme is
rhyming couplets
A couplet is a pair of successive lines of metre in poetry. A couplet usually consists of two successive lines that rhyme and have the same metre. A couplet may be formal (closed) or run-on (open). In a formal (or closed) couplet, each of the ...
, with the first two and second two lines of each verse rhyming.
The last two lines do not rhyme, however.
The
melody
A melody (from Greek μελῳδία, ''melōidía'', "singing, chanting"), also tune, voice or line, is a linear succession of musical tones that the listener perceives as a single entity. In its most literal sense, a melody is a combina ...
follows an AABC pattern, where A, B and C are
musical phrases
In music theory, a phrase ( gr, φράση) is a unit of musical meter that has a complete musical sense of its own, built from figures, motifs, and cells, and combining to form melodies, periods and larger sections.
Terms such as ''sen ...
that last four bars.
Canadian folk songs of the time often employed 16 bar phrases such as this, and it would have been a common pattern in the
Gaspé logging camps where Bolduc first performed publicly. The melody itself comes from a folk tune in
Acadia. The
pitch range
In music, the range, or chromatic range, of a musical instrument is the distance from the lowest to the highest pitch it can play. For a singing voice, the equivalent is vocal range. The range of a musical part is the distance between its lowest ...
is a ninth, common for such folk songs.
The song shows some influence from
broadside ballads, a traditional
Irish song type. It has a very regular pattern that both the music and the lyrics follow. It also opens with the phrase ''Je vais vous dire quelques mots'' which is very similar to the traditional opening of broadside ballads, ''O come ye listen to my story''.
The influence of French folk music can be seen in the use of
enumeration and
assonance
Assonance is a resemblance in the sounds of words/syllables either between their vowels (e.g., ''meat, bean'') or between their consonants (e.g., ''keep, cape''). However, assonance between consonants is generally called ''consonance'' in America ...
.
References
External links
La Cuisinière
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cuisiniere, La
La Bolduc songs
1930 songs
Canadian folk songs