La Baker

Josephine Baker was blessed with her first name, which endeared her to Paris.  Escaping the St. Louis slums to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, she escaped to Paris and les Folies Bergère, sort of like a Soviet athlete defecting to the West.  It didn't hurt that she was willing to perform almost nude.  Know your audience, and it beat the slums of St. Louis.

And make no mistake about it, she defected to freedom - a freedom from Jim Crow - where she became so famous that when the Nazis conquered France, she was able to run a spy ring under their very noses despite being black (Schwartzmusik) and being married to a Jew (Judenmusik).

Her life is an astonishing story, not least when she was asked to perform in the up-and-coming Las Vegas after the war.  They only had segregated nightclubs; she told them that she'd sing, but they'd have to integrate.  They didn't like that, but she'd stared down the Nazis - the Las Vegas nightclubs were nothing.  After all, she'd smuggled messages back to Occupied France from French North Africa in her underwear.

She was the first American woman to be awarded the French Croix de Guerre, equivalent of our Medal Of Honor.



J'ai deux amours may refer to the two countries, France and America.  Then again, it might not - that's a very French ambiguity.

Baker died in 1974, known in France simply as La Baker.  R.I.P.