On Friday 18 September, speaking to Marc-Olivier Fogiel on RTL, Hugues Aufray summed up part of his incredible artistic longevity with a brilliant line: ‘I’ve never been in fashion; that’s why I’m still around.’
That says it all.
Never really being in fashion has one major advantage: you can’t go out of fashion.
Hugues Aufray has never been the sort to follow a spectacular trend, lead a fashion revolution, stage a carefully orchestrated provocation or create a persona designed to grace magazine covers. He’s weathered the yé-yé era, rock, disco, punk, new wave, rap, techno, boy bands, Star Academy, YouTube, TikTok and now artificial intelligence – all with, more or less, the same guitar and the same very simple idea: telling stories.
Whilst fashions came and went with great fanfare, he carried on.
Born on 18 August 1929, Hugues Aufray has just celebrated his 97th birthday. His career now spans nearly seven decades. In particular, he was one of those who introduced a certain American folk culture to France and adapted Bob Dylan’s work very early on, whilst building a repertoire that has become surprisingly intergenerational.
But his true success may lie elsewhere.
Hugues Aufray gives the impression of having achieved what many artists dream of but never manage: to endure without appearing to be merely surviving their own career.
He does not seem to take to the stage to promote a ‘Hugues Aufray museum’.
He still sings because he loves to sing.
Last January, when interviewed before a concert, he explained that he had never really regarded singing as a burdensome job: singing, playing the guitar and taking to the stage remain pleasures for him.
At the age of 97, he’s still hitting the road with his ‘Escapada!’ tour. His official website still lists concerts right through to the end of 2026.
Better still: he continues to revisit his own repertoire.
‘Le Petit Âne gris’ dates back to 1968. Fifty-eight years later, Hugues Aufray has just written a new verse to change the ending, after a priest pointed out to him that the original ending made the children cry.
We should pause for a moment to reflect on this scene.
A 97-year-old man revisits a song he has been performing for over half a century and thinks to himself: ‘Well, I could still improve it.’
Perhaps that is what youth is all about.
Not the absence of wrinkles. Not the advertising fantasy of wanting to look thirty years younger. Youth as the ability to believe that something can still begin tomorrow.
Because Hugues Aufray still has an idea in mind: to set up a little school for children and, in particular, to teach them the ukulele rather than the ever-present school flute.
At the age of 97.
That is almost the most wonderful thing of all.
Because at that age, our society generally allows you two activities: recounting the past and politely waiting for what comes next.
He, however, is making plans.
And then there is another delightful paradox about Hugues Aufray. The man has a career spanning 70 years, songs known to several generations, continues to fill concert halls and has just been elevated to the rank of Commander of the National Order of Merit. And what does he say when asked how he views his career?
‘It’s a failure. ”
Why?
Because, deep down, he wanted to be a painter and sculptor.
He practised sculpture when he could afford to, but retains this amused sense of having missed out on his true calling.
You have to have led a remarkably successful life to be able to look back on 70 years of success and calmly declare that it was all almost a Plan B.
But this statement also reveals something valuable about success.
We have gradually turned artistic life into an Excel spreadsheet: number of sales, streams, views, followers, awards, TV appearances, Google trends. We measure success so much that we sometimes end up forgetting the essential question: is the person who succeeds in this way happy with what they do?
With Aufray, the prevailing impression is of a man who still has the passion.
And that is immense.
The history of music is full of artists who have reached staggering heights and experienced their own decline as a humiliation. Fame can become a particularly cruel prison: once you’ve been number one, everything feels like a decline.
Hugues Aufray seems to have escaped this trap precisely because he never built his life around the need to be number one.
He had to sing.
So he sang.
He had to hit the road.
So he set off.
And seventy years on, he is still singing.
His songs themselves possess something that explains their enduring appeal. They speak of boats, horses, childhood, friendship, departures, journeys, teachers we leave behind, love and freedom. Subjects that age far more slowly than a passing fad.
A child can still sing ‘Santiano’ without having the faintest idea of the year the song was recorded.
Perhaps that, ultimately, is what it means to become a classic.
At the age of 97, Hugues Aufray thus offers us a wonderful life lesson without even setting out to teach us one.
You can be a popular artist without spending your life seeking the limelight.
You can grow old without becoming merely the nostalgic guardian of your own youth.
One can achieve success without making it the sole measure of one’s existence.
One can love, create, perform, learn and still embark on new ventures even though almost a century has passed since one’s birth.
And above all, one can endure without chasing after the times.
In an artistic world that has become obsessed with the moment, trends and the famous ‘buzz’, Hugues Aufray offers, almost in spite of himself, a revolutionary strategy: doing what you love for long enough that fashions end up passing you by several times.
At 97, Hugues Aufray has therefore not come back into fashion.
He has done much better than that.
He has never left it, as he never entered it in the first place.
