George Moustaki, Singer Who Worked With Edith Piaf, Dies at 79
French singer and songwriter Georges Moustaki, beloved in France for his songs celebrating liberty and collaborations with Edith Piaf, died on Thursday after a long illness. He was 79.
The Greek-born Jewish singer grew up in Alexandria, Egypt, and arrived in Paris in 1951, where he began to play guitar at nightclubs and met some of the period’s best-known singers.
He was introduced to Edith Piaf in the late 1950s and started to write songs for the Parisian star, the most famous of which was “Milord” about a lower-class girl who falls in love with an upper-class British traveller.
Developing a reputation as a singer in his own right in the mid-1960s, the hirsute and heavily bearded Moustaki achieved fame with songs including the immigrant ballad “Le Meteque” and “Ma Liberte”, a hymn to the 1960s free-living spirit.
Moustaki, a life-long advocate of left-wing causes, ended his singing career in 2009, later telling newspaper La Croix that he was suffering from an irreversible bronchial illness that made it impossible to carry on.
French Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti hailed an “artist with convictions who conveyed humanist values… and a great poet”, and Twitter was flooded with tributes to a singer who many said had defined their childhoods.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO