Joseph Pierre Claude Gauthier was a singer, songwriter and actor born January 31, 1939 in Lac-Saguay, Québec. He’s still going strong—he celebrated his 86th birthday just last month and even released music as recently as 2023. Over his approximately 65-year career, Gauthier has written over 100 songs, which have since been performed by other big names in Québec’s musical history, like Renée Claude, Louise Forestier, and Pauline Julien, among others.

Second to Félix Leclerc, Gauthier was one of the first singer-songwriters to release an album in Québec. He was also the first French-Canadian to record with labels Columbia and Gamma in the early 1960s, then with Presqu’île in the 1970s. He’s spoken publicly about how Leclerc has been one of his biggest musical inspirations throughout his career; at 12, Gauthier told his mother he wanted to write songs like Leclerc, so she ordered him a $17 guitar from an Eaton’s catalogue. In an interview, Gauthier mentions seeing Leclerc at La Butte à Mathieu and exchanging guitars with him, but being too scared to ever actually use it for fear of it getting stolen.

Gauthier grew up in a musical family; his father led the congregation in singing during mass, while his mother created music in her spare time. He moved to Montréal in 1954, the same year he wrote his first songs, which he performed in boîtes à chansons around the area. Five years into writing music, his song “Le soleil brillera demain” won a contest at CKVL radio station. He recorded his first LP in 1961, with original songs he had written. The 1960s saw Gauthier’s career really start to take off. Notably, he shared the prestigious Carnegie Hall stage in New York with Buffy Sainte-Marie, with whom he wrote “T’es pas une autre” (“Until It’s Time For You To Go”), which has been covered in both French and English, including by Elvis Presley and Neil Diamond. In 1967, Gauthier made his film debut in Michel Brault’s Entre la mer et l’eau douce, in which he also sang his original song “Geneviève.”

In the early 1970s, Gauthier represented Canada in Spa, Belgium, at the Festival international de la Francophonie before taking a break from live performances to focus on his career in film, starring in three movies before making his return to music. After one of his shows, a journalist for the Montréal-Matin noted he had “the facility and the poetry for singing of his roots, his wife, his childhood, his land, his life.” He became somewhat of a cultural ambassador for Québec, representing it on stages all over the world, especially in France, where he found a lot of success as an artist. However, he was still gravitating away from music and towards film well into the 1990s, and didn’t shoot his last film until 1991, when he did Brault’s Quand je serai parti… vous vivrez encore, which tells the story of the 1837 Rebellion in Lower Canada.

Although he started slowing down, Gauthier kept releasing albums throughout the 2000s and 2010s, including L’homme qui passait par là and Pour la suite du monde, the latter of which is thought to be a tribute to Brault, with whom Gauthier had collaborated on many films at this point.

Gauthier was at the peak of his career during the October Crisis and is very passionate about preserving the French language as a key facet of Québec’s cultural identity. During the crisis, he was visited by six law enforcement officers demanding to search his home—though he was not imprisoned, many people he knew had been among the 450-some people who were. He acted in Brault’s Les Ordres, a film about the imprisonment and mistreatment of Canadian citizens enacted by the government in October 1970. One of his biggest hits, “Le plus beau voyage,” also centres themes of Québec independence and his ties to the province.

Sources:

• “Cinq minutes avec Claude Gauthier.” Radio-Canada, 11 Dec. 2020, youtube.com/watch?v=rFQbm-vX3jk (Accessed January 24, 2025)
• “Claude Gauthier.” La Butte à Mathieu: A Place of Hope, Songs and Dreams, 2 May 2023, communitystories.ca/v2/la-butte-a-mathieu_the-butte-a-mathieu/gallery/claude-gauthier/. (Accessed January 24, 2025)
• “Claude Gauthier est loin d’avoir dit son dernier mot.” Radio-Canada, 27 Oct. 2016, ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/811178/claude-gauthier-dernier-album-politique?depuisRecherche=true%5C. (Accessed January 24, 2025)
• Fortier, Marco. “Le «plus beau voyage» de Claude Gauthier dure depuis 65 ans.” Le Devoir, 22 Jan. 2024, ledevoir.com/culture/805747/plus-beau-voyage-claude-gauthier-dure-depuis-65-ans (Accessed January 24, 2025)
• Plouffe, Hélène. “Claude Gauthier.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 6 Jan. 2016, thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/claude-gauthier-emc. (Accessed January 24, 2025)

Songs + Performances:

• “Le plus beau voyage”: https://youtu.be/5fteSJsbvgQ?si=kOnJCfEk8dJtLk80
• “Le soleil brillera demain”: https://youtu.be/sNbdrjbS1Hs?si=7NHvj4qCnUtXyfdZ
• Émission: La boîte à chansons: https://youtu.be/AGhxBglSlok?si=lgW6HEETFFKfprtp