Reviews 135

its best – and a highly enjoyable read to be relished alongside some of the historical
zarzuela recordings by the best Spanish classical singers.

Eva Moreda Rodríguez

University of Glasgow
Eva.MoredaRodriguez@glasgow.ac.uk

Edith Piaf: a Cultural History. By David Looseley. Liverpool: Liverpool

University Press, 2015. 254 pp. ISBN 9781781382578
doi:10.1017/S0261143016000805
David Looseley’s study of one of the enduring icons of 20th-century French popular
culture is not simply a biography: there have been many of these, including two by
the subject herself. As his subtitle implies, Looseley is concerned to analyse the myth-
ical status of this figure, probably the best-known singer of French popular music for
audiences in the English-speaking world. The reason for his avoidance of the bio-
graphical approach is that the mythical life-story of the ‘sparrow kid’ is largely a cre-
ation of the subject herself, who constantly embroidered and developed her
narrative, with the complicity of managers and journalists, and used it to promote
her songs and her performances, with huge international success that survives to
this day. Looseley is concerned to understand the mechanisms that led to this
remarkable public relations triumph. Piaf is not simply an icon for the national cul-
ture of France, but also a ‘diva’ who embodies a tragic destiny comparable to that of
Billie Holliday, Judy Garland or even Maria Callas. Looseley highlights the inconsist-
encies in the accounts of her early years, often perpetuated by Piaf herself, and traces
her early career from the ‘street singer’ of the mid 1930s, by way of cabaret perfor-
mances, to the star of the French music-hall during the years of the German occupa-
tion of France from 1940 onwards. Her emergence as an international star in the years
after the Second World War was the result of her successful career in the USA, cul-
minating in prestigious performances at the Carnegie Hall in 1956 and 1957. Her bat-
tle with ill-health and drug addiction was conducted largely in public and when she
died in 1963 she was given to all intents and purposes a state funeral. David
Looseley’s trawl through the secondary literature behind this well-known story is
impeccable in its scholarly thoroughness, as he unearths telling journalistic reviews
of her performances, revealing anecdotes from the memoirs of her team of collabora-
tors, and not just in the French context, but also from her North American career,
where the resonances are markedly different: she becomes a representative of a resur-
gent France. Looseley’s analysis doesn’t stop with her death, however; he unpicks the
ways her posterity has been constructed and perpetuated up to the centenary of her
birth in 2015. He traces the way her legacy can be recognised in the way more recent
singers such as Mireille Mathieu, Patricia Kaas and Zaz are concerned to appropriate
some of her aura and prestige, as well as the international success of the biographical
film by Olivier Dahan, La Môme (or La Vie en Rose) of 2007, which launched the career
of Marion Cotillard. She has also been extensively commemorated in the UK by
numerous performances of Pam Gems’ play Piaf, that combines the soap-opera of
her life with her best-known songs. David Looseley’s volume is an indispensable ref-
erence for anyone interested in the complexity behind the mythical figure of Piaf, and

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 136 Reviews

it provides an admirable model for a searching analysis of the myth-making machin-

ery of popular music.

Peter Hawkins
University of Bristol
p.g.hawkins@bristol.ac.uk

Street Ballads in Nineteenth-century Britain, Ireland, and North America: The

Interface between Print and Oral Traditions. Edited by David Atkinson and
Steve Roud. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. 290 pp. ISBN 9781472427410
doi:10.1017/S0261143016000817
This collection of 12 essays challenges and explores the notion that the ballad trad-
ition in the British Isles and North America is a strictly oral tradition. Emerging
from the collection is a complex picture of the various ways in which ballads were
transmitted, their origins and their endurance.
The book begins with a highly useful note on the terminology used throughout,
sources, abbreviations and collections of ballads with their websites. This is a helpful
resource for looking up ballads referenced in the essays while reading, as well as
keeping the sometimes overlapping terms such as ‘slip song’, ‘songster’, ‘garland’
and ‘chapbook’ straight.
Steve Roud’s introduction strongly sets out the questions the collection strives
to address. The 19th century has been previously neglected in studies of street litera-
ture, possibly because much of the surviving material is in large uncatalogued collec-
tions. He notes that the idea of a purely oral tradition actually died with the
Reformation, when the vast majority of the population became literate. One of the
aims of the collection is to unpack and explore the myth of the oral tradition, and
where that tradition intersects with a literate society. Chapbooks were available
cheaply to the most rural of people in the 19th century as society became more
urban and mobile, and Roud’s observation of this cultural background provides a
strong context for the essays that follow.
David Atkinson’s essay, ‘Was There Really a “Mass Extinction of Old Ballads”
in the Romantic Period?’ investigates the extent to which the print trade influenced
the development of the ballad tradition. He responds to an argument made by
William St Clair in his The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004) that after 1600 a monopoly on printing effectively
froze the popular canon, causing nearly 200 years of literature to be largely homogen-
ous. The monopoly lasted until 1774 when Scottish booksellers challenged the copy-
right law, resulting in more large-scale printings of all manner of literature. The ‘mass
extinction’ was a result of economic changes. By using examples of ballads from their
first printing to collection in Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Atkinson
explores St Clair’s contention. Ultimately the essay is inconclusive, owing to a lack
of research on the subject as Atkinson notes, but calls attention to the ways in
which ballads survived and were disseminated through different methods in print
culture. Atkinson observes that some of the reasons for survival could have been
an emotional investment in the idea of traditional ballads, which in turn led to
them being maintained in print. The mass extinction, however, is not without
merit either, as many ballads did disappear. Atkinson speculates that these ballads

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