I’m a fan of listening to music I can’t really understand. I like Arabic calls to prayer, Pavoratti operas, and, more so than the others, Joe Dassin’s French folk songs. My French is very rusty so I only catch about a quarter of what Dassin sings (“I think it’s something about the morning…okay, now it’s about chocolate”). His music has always slightly irritated me until I listened to the song “Salut les Amoureux” for the first time. My head nearly exploded.
The music is exactly the same as “City of New Orleans” by Arlo Guthrie (orginally written by Steve Goodman). There is no question about it. It’s eerie and slightly off-putting, especially if you dont’ understand French.
It’s not the same song in a different language, though. Guthrie’s is about a train; Dassin’s is about lovers. But the music is the same.
So my question is: is the music to these songs an older tune that predates both or is it a case of plagrism?
Both songs were recorded/released in 1972 ("…amoureux" and “…new orleans” ) so I’m left curious as to which came first and where the music came from.
Couldn’t open your link to the Dassin’s lyrics. But I will take a guess of why the lyrics are so dissimilar. It is not uncommon for French song translations to have vastly different lyrics from the original English ones (for example, I remember a 60s Québec group who did a song called in French Le petit soldat de bois [The Little Wooden Soldier] which used the same music as the Beatles “With A Little Help From My Friends”). The reason this happens, I believe, is because either the theme of the song is not adaptable to a French audience (no cultural relevances) or it cannot be adequately translated within the framework of the music.
It appears to be fairly well known that the tunes for the two songs are the same. Do a Google search on “Salut Les Amoureux” and “City of New Orleans” and you’ll get a couple dozen webpages that speak of them as being the same song. (Most of these pages are in French.) One webpage says that there’s a German song with the same tune which was released in 1975. My guess is that Dassin is paying royalties to Steve Goodman for the tune.