In 1959, Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel released the francophone song ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’. It was issued as a single, on an EP, and featured on his fourth album. It was then recorded in at least 1,700 different versions over time, and has now become the title and subject of Maya Angela Smith’s book, published in Duke University Press’s Singles series.
The author addresses Brel’s 1959 recording and a televised live version from 1966, as well as Nina Simone’s interpretations (both her studio recording from 1965 and a television performance from 1971), Rod McKuen’s English-language translation, analysed through Shirley Bassey’s rendition (the studio version from 1967 and a live version from 1976), and other instances of the song’s use in films and stage productions.
Throughout its four chapters, mapping over the aforementioned cases, the author covers an impressively wide range of topics. The first chapter briefly introduces the history of French popular music and Jacques Brel’s unique position within that tradition, before subjecting his lyrics, music, and performances to an excellent analysis culminating in a theoretical reflection on ‘affect, authenticity, and emotional truthfulness’ (p. 24). The second chapter offers a theoretical overview of cover songs, before convincingly demonstrating how songs can indeed have multiple owners, particularly when they shift demographic contexts and target audiences. In the third chapter, Smith delves into translation theory with a number of astute observations, including the obvious yet often overlooked point that translation involves more than merely transferring text 1:1 from one language to another. Song lyrics are, after all, both music and words imbued with semantic significance, thereby allowing numerous ways to engage with a text, along with the various cultural and demographic factors at play. The fourth and final chapter shifts the focus to adaptations in films and staged performances.
The fundamental originality of this book lies in the author’s perspective, who self-defines as ‘… a Black American woman from a monolingual, English-speaking family’. Smith claims that the song has had a life-altering impact on her, which adds a remarkably touching dimension to her work and supports, thanks to personal narrative, and the theoretical points made. In addition to the interplay between autobiography and theory, the book’s greatest strength lies in the detailed analyses. The various performances that serve as the primary objects of analysis have been listened to and viewed repeatedly, and the author’s observations of her own and others’ reactions are both fascinating and relevant.
From a more critical perspective, the central placement of these analyses – constituting a significant portion of the pages – also represents the book’s greatest weakness. It becomes clear that the majority of the author’s efforts have been dedicated to engaging with the specific cases rather than reconstructing broader contexts or narratives. One must research intensively to find facts and chronology, often in vain. For instance, there is an excellent analysis of how the song is used in Pedro Almodóvar’s 1987 film La Ley del deseo, yet it is not mentioned anywhere that the specific recording, by Maysa Matarazzo, is from 1961.
This means that interested readers have to leave the text to search for this information elsewhere. A discography, at least, would have been helpful. Upon examining the references to the various versions of the song, it becomes evident that they all link to online videos, yet Smith’s book was written in a media landscape entirely different from the one in which the song’s original release and narrative unfolded. In 1959, 1965, or 1967, there was no option to repeatedly watch and listen to the same television and radio broadcast. In this book, however, references are made, sometimes indifferently, to content uploaded by private individuals on digital platforms like YouTube. While this reflects a world – including the academic world – where constant access has become nearly second nature, this is problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, the author generally relies on the metadata of Internet pages, resulting in unfortunate mistakes regarding release dates, for instance, when many valid sources – including online – exist for double-checking discographic facts (https://www.brelitude.net/; Discogs). When writing about songs that travelled through different languages, cultures, and mediascapes, it is particularly important that references be precise.
Secondly, in the event that some of these video uploads were deleted, there is no way to verify the sources mentioned by the author. At least one of the versions mentioned, recorded by Barbara and uploaded to YouTube by a certain Manuel Rodriques Lx (note 25, p. 123), is no longer available at the time of writing (November 2025). A version of the page has been archived on the Internet Archive (https://web.archive.org/web/20230817191218/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Upzso5vghM), but not the video itself. While some effort allows one to identify the recording, presumably dating from 1961, reissued in 1963, and later available on CD, it should be easier for readers to identify the source material.
Regarding the chronology of the song’s different lives, it would have been beneficial to include a description of how ‘If You Go Away’ became a hit and subsequently a classic. While it is entirely valid to focus on specific cases, context is crucial, especially in this instance. A closer examination of the database of cover versions of Brel’s songs referenced on Brelitude (https://www.brelitude.net/) reveals that the number of recordings of ‘If You Go Away’ surged in 1967. This aligns well with the song’s appearance on several Billboard charts at the end of 1966 and the beginning of 1967, an uptick corresponding to a recording by Damita Jo, probably the first release of the Anglophone version. But Damita Jo is not mentioned in Smith’s book, disappointingly so given her status as a Black American artist, which would have reinforced the racialised dimension, and very valid originality, of the author’s perspective.
In defence of Maya Angela Smith, her choices become entirely candid at the end of the book, when she writes that her initial intention to tell one single song’s story became a self-reflexive experience: ‘I set out to tell the story of a single song. Instead, I uncovered its multiplicity and instability. And as I’ve tried to understand my relationship with this song, I’ve wound up awed by its many connections with diverse audiences. A song isn’t just text and sound. It’s a set of lived, performed audiovisual experiences influenced by a range of contexts and media – in studio, on stage, on screen, and online. And we can measure its success based on the transcendence of the emotional reactions it triggers and the impact of these affective elements on our individual and collective experiences’ (p. 114).
I wholeheartedly support these wise and significant words, and with the aforementioned caveats, I warmly recommend Ne Me Quitte Pas. Maya Angela Smith is a brilliant and creative scholar. I am looking forward to reading and learning more from her in the future.
