Une Petite Laitue, A Little Big Scat
A Little Bit of Lettuce, Mayo and Yogurt with Roy Eldridge
A Season's Past in Paris featuring Roy Eldridge's Une Petite Laitue
A friend's wedding ushered me back to the Hexagon in 2015. It was my second time there and my first seeing Paris adorned in tinsel for the holiday season. The recorded memories sat on a drive for the past decade, digitally composting away. Now seemed as good as any other to do something with them.
This resulting video was coupled with a song discovered during that time by Jazz artist, Roy Eldridge, called Une petite laitue. It is a really fun tune, despite not understanding anything he sang when I first heard it, but as I would learn now, perhaps he didn't either.
The story behind Une Petite Laitue
Une petite laitue, des tomates, avec de la mayonnaise.
A small lettuce, some tomatoes, with some mayonnaise.
That's the translation you get in most translation apps, but 'a small lettuce' seems a bit odd to me. Does it make sense? Would it be better understood as a partitive like a little bit of lettuce? Reverso turned up some other possibilities like 'baby-leaf lettuce' but even that seemed off. But did Roy even care?
Une Petite Laitue was recorded for the record label Disque Vogue around 1950. In Copper, Anne E. Johnson writes:
There’s no trumpet part on “Une Petit Laitue”; instead, Eldridge sings. In French, sort of. It’s less about meaningful lyrics and more about using nonsense French syllables as a bridge to more standard scat sounds.
Were the lyrics really just meaningless and a bridge to scatting? Someone still wrote them, it's not just pure gibberish, I mean Chat GPT was still 70 years away. My searching really didn't reveal much until I came upon an interview with Roy on Marian McPartland's Jazz Radio from 1986. The first excerpt below comes at around 14 minutes and 54 seconds into the interview where Roy speaks about his time in France.
Marian McPartland's Jazz Piano inteview with Roy Eldridge, Excerpt #1
Who wrote the French lyrics?
When Roy first came to France, he didn't speak any French, but was forced to learn after moving into a neighborhood where nobody spoke English (my dream). He continues on to say:
So I figured I needed a song. So I got together with a couple of my friend and I come up with this song called, Une petite laitue. And by the way, it turned out to be a hit record over there.
Marian then asks who wrote the lyrics? Roy then recalls a Frenchman who played tenor, but he doesn't remember his name. Roy brings up Vogue records in which Marian recalls Charles Delaunay's name. In looking up the credits to the track, there are actually several Frenchmen who play on the song. The two tenor saxophonists are Albert Ferreri and Don Byas. Don was an American but Albert was French.
Vogue Records or Disques Vogues was founded by Leon Cabat and Charles Delaunay. At least that's what most searches reveal. It wasn't until I saw the French Wiki page for Diques Vogue when Albert's name appeared as another founder which let me to finding a page where Radio France also mentions Albert and a Record Collection Magazine article about the label.
Vogue was a French company, set up just after the second world war by three enterprising young men, magazine owner Charles Delaunay, musician Albert Ferreri and business man Léon Cabat. All three were jazz fans and with capital of just 600 francs (around £30 at 1947 exchange rates), the original intention was to record local jazz musicians, but the first releases came from the US, where Delaunay had worked recording American artists for his Swing label and released in France through EMI.
There isn't much else out there about Albert Ferreri, but it seems as though he was the most likely lyricist for Une petite laitue. Roy goes on to perform the piece for Marian on the show and gives some more commentary on the song. Below is the performance and additional commentary in excerpt #2.
Marian McPartland's Jazz Piano inteview with Roy Eldridge, Excerpt #2
Roy continues on to say he doesn't know what the song means, but that there's milk in it, mayonnaise, some fish, it's just all the words together with some French words.
"It's a French scat." Marian says.
"Yeah!" Roy replies.
At this point in time Roy is about 75 years old and there's a lot more scatting in his live performance. He had given up playing the trumpet at this point because of a stroke. Lyrically, we know there was no milk, no fish, but maybe that wasn't the point after all. There's a groove, melody and feel to it all. What could you say about Marian's reaction to end of his performance? It's absolutely adorable, almost indescribable, a pure unadulterated giddiness, "That is so cute!"
Recently, I came upon this post on Twitter by David Perell where he talks to poet Dana Diola and writes:
People stopped liking poetry because we got too good at teaching it.
For thousands of years, poetry was central to education and people loved it because we were so bad at teaching it. Then came a group called the New Critics in the 1920s who figured out how to analyze poetry. For the first time in history, poetry was taught right and it killed the audience.
How was poetry taught before? You memorized it. You recited it. You sang it. And you didn't teach poetry as something that needed to be understood via analysis.
The best way to teach poetry is like this: experience it, perform it, memorize it. Once you've done that, then you can do the analysis. But analysis is secondary to what poetry is.
People stopped liking poetry because we got too good at teaching it.
— David Perell (@david_perell) December 16, 2025
For thousands of years, poetry was central to education and people loved it because we were so bad at teaching it. Then came a group called the New Critics in the 1920s who figured out how to analyze poetry.… https://t.co/631suV060T pic.twitter.com/POWHrHfcE4
There was something about the way Dana described how the getting good at analyzing and teaching something killed the audience for the medium. Then he asks and replies, "What's the proper response to a song? It's to dance. It's to tap your foot. It's to sing along."
And there's something to scatting that embodies that notion. No need to analyze, overthink it, just enjoy the rhythm, the groove, and go with the flow.
Scatting en yaourt
@hellofrench doing a little holiday edition of chanter en yaourt.
Roy mentions that the song was a hit in France, played on jukeboxes and bars. An American scat singing with French lyrics with that grand American accent.
At some point during my learning journey I came upon the phrase 'chanter en yaourt,' literally, singing in yogurt. Imagine the French singing gibberish with an English accent or faking the lyrics.
Having seen it in person it's really something, but then again, we've all done it when we don't know the lyrics.
Roy was basically doing the same except the other way around, and really at the end of the day, if you dig it you just dig it, which pleasantly, the French did.
Où est Roy? Roy est à la piscine.
In the liner notes for Frenchie Roy, some more background is shed on the song. It reads:
Surrounded by Frenchmen, he was given the opportunity that same year to make new recordings with which his vocal feats in this second language and his natural cheeky humour glorified the merits of a head of lettuce with tomatoes and some mayonnaise which he himself had discovered lying around the swimming pool in Isle Adam amidst a warm and friendly atmosphere.
L'Isle-Adam is a town that sits about 16 miles northwest of Paris. This little excerpt about Roy discovering a head of lettuce with tomatoes and mayo while at a swimming pool the fellas might shed some light on the lyrics.
Qu'est-ce que tu as? Qu'est-ce que tu veux? Qu'est-ce que tu dis?
What's happening? What do you think? What are you drinking?
You could almost imagine the conversations they were having poolside. Just kind of jiving. Maybe they were chatting about the ins and outs of performing every night, trying to keep things fresh, and staying out of trouble.
Toujours la même histoire
Always the same storyC'est la même, la même folie
It's the same, same madness
Roy was affectionately known as Little Jazz, an oxymoronic nickname given to him by Otto Harwich, contrasting his shorter stature and dynamic playing style. In just listening to the interview with Marian, you could just feel his energy and jovial nature, even in his 70s. Definitely a character.
A Great Day in Harlem
One of the more remarkable things in listening to Marian's interview with Roy was learning how they were both in what is arguably the most famous photo taken in jazz history, A Great Day in Harlem. They are both standing on the front row. You can see Roy sharing a funny moment with Dizzy Gillespie on the far right. And Marian was one of only three women, the others being Mary Lou Williams (next to her) and Maxine Sullivan.
My first encounter with the photo was in college during a Jazz Appreciation course where my professor shared the story of how Thelonius Monk held up the shoot because he was trying to decide on what to wear. He was fashionably late in his yellow jacket for a black and white photo.
Roy Eldridge would pass a few years after his appearance on Jazz Piano in 1989. Marian McPartland, along with being an accomplished musician, would host Jazz Piano for 30 years, making it one of the the longest running shows on public radio before passing in 2013.
It was such a treat being able to find this interview and listen in on Roy's French immersion experience and creating a piece in another tongue, even if he didn't really know what he was singing about. Some things just transcend language.
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