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Patachou, real name Henriette Ragon (born 10 June 1918) is a French singer from the 12th arrondissement of Paris. She was born and grew up in Paris and began her working life as a typist, then a factory worker, a shoeseller , an antique dealer. In 1948, with her husband Jean Billou she took over a cabaret-restaurant on the butte of Montmartre, called Patachou. (Their son Pierre Billou had a certain success as a singer in the 1970s and wrote J'ai oublié de vivre for Johnny Hallyday.) She began to sing in the patisserie-bistro and french journalists began to call her Patachou after the name of her cabaret restaurant (pâte-à-choux means cream puff dough). Georges Brassens sang there, and together they sang the duet Maman,papa. In effect she was the first to interpret his songs, Le bricoleur, La chasse aux papillons etc. The evening she sang them for the first time she suggested her audience stay to the very end of the show so as to meet the writer of these songs, and Brassens went up on to the Patachou stage for the first time and sang Le Gorille and P..de toi a song Patachou believed she wasn't able to interpret herself. In some ways in the post-World War II age she was able to both turn back the calendar and yet remain contemporary - most evident in her mode of dress at that time, a plain white shirt with high Dior collar and tight fitting tailored skirt. Sometimes she would collect half-ties (she had the habit of snipping ties of customers too shy to join in the singing) - Thomas Dewey and Errol Flynn were among her victims.^[1]

From 1952 her first records appeared; she appeared at 'Bobino', a Montparnasse music-hall, toured in France and then further afield. From 1953, at the Palladium, the Waldorf Astoria, and Carnegie Hall, and throughout the United States. From the beginning of the 1970s she toured Japan and Sweden where 'L'eternal Parigot', with her cheeky Parisian register was popular.

She has worked also in theatre and cinema.

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