Partition piano et chant "Cirer m'sieu ! ... (Shoe shine boy)"

First edition of this song for voice and piano, with a colour-illustrated front cover in a geometric Art Deco style by Roger de Milos. A very fine copy.

Cirer m'sieu !... is the French adaptation of Shoe Shine Boy, composed by Saul Chaplin with lyrics by Sammy Cahn for the revue Connie's Hot Chocolates of 1936, first performed in Harlem in late October 1935. Almost immediately recorded by Louis Armstrong, the song became a swing standard, subsequently taken up by Tommy Dorsey and by the small ensemble with which Count Basie, recording under the name Jones-Smith Incorporated, preserved Lester Young's very first recorded solo. This French edition, published by Salabert in 1937, credits the French lyrics to « Jean Cis » — the pseudonym under which Francis Salabert, the publisher himself, was registered as a songwriter with SACEM.

Far from being a straightforward translation, the French lyrics entirely recast the protagonist: the poor child of Harlem becomes a young shoeshine boy « né là-bas, dans la kasbah », dreaming on the pavements of Paris of returning « au soleil africain ». A rare document illustrating, through both text and image, the manner in which the French sheet-music industry reframed African American repertoire through the prism of its own colonial imagination.