With the rise of the radio in the 1930s, popular music and hit-making celebrities had a wider audience than ever before. The decade saw the birth of the age of amplification and electronic recording. Radio stations relied on new popular songs from records and recorded concerts to gain larger audiences and fill air time. Not only could French citizens listen to the same music, they could hear vocal tones impossible to understand from the stage. New kinds of voices emerged: softer, more melodic, and more subtle. But the softness could also be seen as transgressing gender norms, as men took on soft tones and emotionality reserved for women. A new singing icon arose: the crooner. In, two of the most popular crooners were Jean Sablon, who was the first on French radio, and Tino Rossi, a young artist from, who would become the archetype of the form, singing love songs to radio audiences who bought his records in the millions.
My paper will explore these men and their songs, playing close attention to the role that the new, intimate medium of radio and its listening audience played in their success. The crooners needed their radio audience, the women who fell in love with their seductive music. That female audience was primed to understand and enjoy these singers by broadcasters’ push toward intimacy with the radio listeners in how they programmed and wrote about the radio. My paper will look at the role crooners played in shaping French masculinity in a period known to the French as their “golden age” of song, and the role that the radio microphone and reception played in their huge success.
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