The composer of Piaf’s “No, I regret nothing” has died at 95

Songwriter and the singer Charles Dumont, who composed the song No, I don’t regret anything (No, I don’t regret anything) made world famous by Edith Piaf, died at the age of 95, his partner announced to AFP on Monday November 18.

Dumont, who also collaborated with American singer Barbra Streisand and 1960s Franco-Italian star Dalida, died at home after a long illness.

French Culture Minister Rachida Dati called Dumont a “significant figure in French song.”

A trumpeter by training, Dumont saw his career transformed at the turn of the 1960s when he convinced the star singer Piaf to perform one of his compositions, after having been forcefully refused several times.

“We arrived at her house and she let us in,” Dumont told AFP in 2018 about the day in 1960 when he managed to see Piaf with his lyricist Michel Vaucaire.

“I played this piece on the piano and … we became inseparable,” he said, adding that the song – which he wrote in 1956, at the age of 27 – had revived Piaf’s career, which he believed was in decline.

No, I don’t regret anything has since become an unforgettable classic by Piaf, who died in 1963.

“My mother gave birth to me, but Edith Piaf gave birth to me,” Dumont told AFP in a 2015 interview.

“Without her, I would never have done everything I did, neither as a composer nor as a singer,” he added.

For Dumont, this meeting marked the beginning of a fruitful working relationship with Piaf, which would allow him to write more than 30 songs for her.

Sometimes she straightened him out, like one evening after a concert where he complained that the audience hadn’t been good.

“She looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘They’re not the bad ones. It was you who was no good,’” he recalls.

The collaboration with Piaf gave Dumont the confidence to approach Streisand, who was already a star in the 1960s and on her way to becoming one of the best-selling artists of all time.

A music publisher approached him about his services, advice he later described as “destiny” giving him “a kick in the butt.”

He went to New York and played for her on the piano in her dressing room at a Broadway theater. “She said to me, ‘I really like it. I’ll make the record. Goodbye young man,” he said.

Streisand released a single with Dumont’s The Wall sung in French on side A, and its English version I have been here on side B, in 1966.

Dumont’s last appearance on stage dates back to 2019 in Paris.

“When you come back in front of an audience, who comes to see you like they did 20, 30 or 40 years ago and gives you the same welcome, then it makes you feel like you were in your 20s,” he said. AFP