I’ve been working on a particular family project for awhile and this is a song I really wanted to include. It’s an old french classic whose lyrics were written by Frédéric Doria (1841-1900) and by Camille Soubise and L. Le Maître; the music was written by Marius Richard at la Scala (Paris) in 1882.

The song was a very special favourite that my grandfather used to sing, long ago. My aunt Brigitte told me about it when I was teaching her some ukulele via Skype, 5 years ago, and I started arranging it back then as a future project for someday…  After our Easter family Zoom session, my nephew, my brother and I decided to start working on learning the song for my grandmother’s 100th birthday, which is actually coming up this Tuesday. Bon anniversaire, Memère!

Since my brother and his family live in New Brunswick, this is how we collaborated on the song together to create a multi-track recording to play for her on her big day. I transposed the arrangement I had into the key of G and substituted the ukulele melody to a baritone ukulele. I just uploaded the .xml file into SoundSlice. It was actually pretty user-friendly for a first attempt. The most fun part is how they let you line up your sheet music to an accompanying video, all using a free account! What a great teaching tool this is! 

My nephew (Meelo, who’s a budding young artist, check out his SoundCloud) then sent me a recording of himself playing along on a guitar and his dad then sent me a vocal track. Then I added a harmony vocal and a few ukulele improvisations, and finally my daughter Stephanie added a little viola riff which I used as the intro/outro to the finished recording. We didn’t create a video but you can hear the finished song posted on my SoundCloud now. 

If you’d like to cover this arrangement yourself or just sing/play along, head over to SoundSlice or just play or sing along to my YouTube version.