La Cuisinière is a song written by Mary Bolduc and released by the

Starr Record Company Starr Records was a record label founded by the Starr Piano Company of Richmond, Indiana. Gennett Records was also owned by Starr Piano. Starr's first discs were vertical cut records in the mid 1910s based on Edison Records standard found in th ...

on her fourth record, alongside '' Johnny Monfarleau''. Although it was her fourth release, this was her first record to achieve any commercial success. ''La Cuisinière'' was very successful, selling twelve thousand copies in

Quebec Quebec is Canada's List of Canadian provinces and territories by area, largest province by area. Located in Central Canada, the province shares borders with the provinces of Ontario to the west, Newfoundland and Labrador to the northeast, ...

, which was unprecedented sales for a record at the time. The success of the song made Bolduc a household name in Quebec. The song tells of the encounters of a domestic servant with various

suitor Courtship is the period wherein some Couple (relationship), couples get to know each other prior to a possible marriage or committed romantic, ''de facto'' relationship. Courtship traditionally may begin after a betrothal and may conclude with th ...

s. The overall tone is humorous. This follows a long tradition of French comedic folk songs dealing with rejected suitors. The lyrics are set in five versus, each of four lines. Each verse ends with the phrase: ''Hourra pour la cuisinière''. The general rhyming scheme is

rhyming couplets In poetry, a couplet ( ) or distich ( ) is a pair of successive lines that rhyme and have the same metre. A couplet may be formal (closed) or run-on (open). In a formal (closed) couplet, each of the two lines is end-stopped, implying that there ...

, with the first two and second two lines of each verse rhyming. The last two lines do not rhyme, however. The

melody A melody (), also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones that the listener perceives as a single entity. In its most literal sense, a melody is a combination of Pitch (music), pitch and rhythm, while more figurativel ...

follows an AABC pattern, where A, B and C are musical phrases that last four bars. Canadian folk songs of the time often employed 16 bar phrases such as this, and it would have been a common pattern in the Gaspé logging camps where Bolduc first performed publicly. The melody itself comes from a folk tune in

Acadia Acadia (; ) was a colony of New France in northeastern North America which included parts of what are now the The Maritimes, Maritime provinces, the Gaspé Peninsula and Maine to the Kennebec River. The population of Acadia included the various ...

. The

pitch range In music, the range, or chromatic range, of a musical instrument is the distance from the lowest to the highest pitch it can play. For a singing voice, the equivalent is vocal range. The range of a musical part is the distance between its lowes ...

is a ninth, common for such folk songs. The song shows some influence from

broadside ballads A broadside (also known as a broadsheet) is a single sheet of inexpensive paper printed on one side, often with a ballad, rhyme, news and sometimes with woodcut illustrations. They were one of the most common forms of printed material between the ...

, a traditional Irish song type. It has a very regular pattern that both the music and the lyrics follow. It also opens with the phrase ''Je vais vous dire quelques mots'' which is very similar to the traditional opening of broadside ballads, ''O come ye listen to my story''. The influence of French folk music can be seen in the use of

enumeration An enumeration is a complete, ordered listing of all the items in a collection. The term is commonly used in mathematics and computer science to refer to a listing of all of the element (mathematics), elements of a Set (mathematics), set. The pre ...

and

assonance Assonance is the repetition of identical or similar phonemes in words or syllables that occur close together, either in terms of their vowel phonemes (e.g., ''lean green meat'') or their consonant phonemes (e.g., ''Kip keeps capes ''). However, in ...

References

External links

La Cuisinière
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cuisiniere, La La Bolduc songs 1930 songs Canadian folk songs