Graeme Allwright

Graeme Allwright (7 November 1926 – 16 February 2020) was a New Zealand-born French singer and songwriter. He became popular in the 1960s and 1970s as a French language interpreter of the songs of American and Canadian songwriters such as Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Pete Seeger, and remained active into his nineties.

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Allwright grew up in Hāwera before attending Wellington College. While growing up he heard jazz and American folk songs on radio broadcasts for US troops stationed at Paekākāriki and Tītahi Bay, and sang with his family at local fairs. He started acting in Wellington at the age of 15, and won a scholarship to attend the Old Vic theatre school in London. He travelled to England by ship, working as a cabin boy to pay his way, and began training and working as an actor in London. He was offered a place at the Royal Shakespeare Company but turned it down so as to move to France in 1948 with his girlfriend Catherine Dasté, a fellow theatre student who was the daughter of actor and theatre director Jean Dasté. Allwright worked as a carpenter on theatre sets while gradually becoming fluent in the French language. He and Catherine married in 1951; they later divorced.

Allwright then worked in the vineyards of Burgundy and ran a theatre group in Pernand-Vergelesses, while learning the guitar and listening to the records of American singers such as Woody Guthrie, Tom Paxton and Pete Seeger. He lived in Blois, where he worked in a psychiatric hospital, and then settled in Dieulefit where he taught English and started a children's theatre group. He discovered an aptitude for translation while adapting New Zealand stories into French for his students, and then, after moving to Saint-Étienne, began translating American songs into French. In the early 1960s he began performing in small clubs in Paris, where he met fellow singer Colette Magny and the actor and singer Marcel Mouloudji, who were impressed with Allwright's ability to adapt the lyrics of writers such as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen into French.

Mouloudji recorded Allwright and released his songs in 1965, firstly on the EP "Le Trimardeur" (a song adapted from Woody Guthrie's "Hard Travelin'"), and then on a self-titled LP. The album included adaptations of songs by Guthrie and Oscar Brand as well as several by French songwriter Paul Koulak, and Allwright's own material. He won a recording contract with Mercury Records, and his second album, also entitled Graeme Allwright, was issued in 1968. It featured adaptations of Dylan's "Who Killed Davy Moore?" ("Qui a tué Davy Moore?") and Malvina Reynolds' "Little Boxes" ("Petites boites"), as well as his own song "Il faut que je m'en aille (Les retrouvailles)", and became popular with students during the May 68 protests. ...

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