Charles Aznavour

“Before Aznavour,” the French writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau once quipped, “despair was unpopular.”

“There are no taboos in art,” he told the London Guardian years later. “Lautrec painted a woman on a chamber pot. Art is art. How can we have less in music?”

“Country music tells stories, and my songs tell stories,” he said. “I start with anything — you, me, the telephone, the kids — and I create a story. It’s what songs should do.

“Sure, I’m a country-music writer,” he added, “but my country is France.”