Three Pieces of Illustrated Sheet Music Showing Josephine Baker in Paris: J’ai deux Amours; Sur Deux Notes; Revoir Paris.
Various publishers, 1930–1949. Three titles as follows: J’ai deux Amours. Fox-trot chanté par Josephine Baker. Paris: Éditions Salabert, 1930. 4 pp. Fine condition;
A tight, visually appealing trio of illustrated Parisian sheet music issues tracing Josephine Baker’s arc from Jazz Age sensation to postwar cultural legend. J’ai deux Amours—arguably her defining anthem—captures the carefully crafted dual identity that propelled Baker’s rise: African American expatriate turned Parisian icon, marketed simultaneously as modernist spectacle and cosmopolitan muse. As scholars have noted, Baker’s image circulated widely through commercial ephemera such as sheet music covers, where graphic design, celebrity branding, and racialized fantasy converged in the interwar marketplace.[1]
Sur Deux Notes reflects Baker’s assimilation into mainstream chanson culture and her ongoing collaborations within Paris’s cabaret milieu, while Revoir Paris, issued after World War II, resonates with her decorated service in the French Resistance and her celebrated return to the Folies Bergère stage. Together, these pieces offer a compact visual and musical snapshot of Baker’s evolving persona across two decades—part performance artifact, part cultural document, and wholly emblematic of Paris as a crossroads of Black modernism and popular entertainment.
[1] Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image (University of Illinois Press, 2007).
Price: $300.00