Edith Giovanna Gassion, known as Edith Piaf (1915-1963), was a French music hall/cabaret singer whose specialty was the love ballad.

Edith Gassion was born in Belleville, a congested working-class neighborhood of Paris, on December 19, 1915. Her mother, Anetta Maillard (Gassion), was a café singer who went by the name Line Marsa. Of Algerian circus descent, she was a habitual drifter. Edith's father, Louis Alphonse Gassion, was from Normandy, a slim, five-foot-tall circus acrobat who worked in the Paris streets when he was not on tour in provincial France. He had three theatrical sisters, one of whom, Edith's Tante (Aunt) Zaza, performed in tightrope acts.

Louis was also a drifter, but he loved Edith and took care of her, in his own way, when he could. In contrast, Edith's mother casually abandoned the girl in infancy. This child, Edith Piaf, was to become an enormously popular singer of...