Maya Angela Smith presents 'Ne me quitte pas'

Third Place Books is thrilled to welcome back Dr. Maya Angela Smith for a discussion of her new book, , in which Smith follows the classic song’s long and varied journey, from Jacques Brel’s iconic 1966 performance on French television to Nina Simone’s cover to Shirley Bassey’s English-language version to its contemporary manifestations in popular culture. This event is free and open to the public.

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In 1959, Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel wrote and performed “Ne me quitte pas” (Don’t leave me), a visceral and haunting plea for his lover to come back. As a teenager, Maya Angela Smith was so captivated by Nina Simone’s powerful 1965 cover of the song that it inspired her to be a French professor. In Ne me quitte pas, Smith follows the classic song’s long and varied journey, from Brel’s iconic 1966 performance on French television to Simone’s cover to Shirley Bassey’s English-language version (“If You Go Away”) to its contemporary manifestations in popular culture. Throughout, Smith shows that as the song travels across languages, geographies, genres, and generations, it accumulates shifting artistic and cultural significance as each listener creates their own meaning.

Maya Angela Smith is a sociolinguist, a professor in the Department of French and Italian Studies, and the Associate Dean for Equity, Justice, and Inclusion in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington. She began her career primarily focused on the intersection of race, language, and identity among members of the Francophone African diaspora, such as in her book, Senegal Abroad (Wisconsin, 2019), winner of the Modern Language Association’s French and Francophone Studies book prize. Recent writing continues exploring this intersection but through the lens of music. Her upcoming book, Ne me quitte pas (Duke, 2025), analyzes how “Ne me quitte pas”—a text, a piece of cultural production written in a specific context, and a work of mass/popular art—travels across languages, geographies, genres, and generations by using Nina Simone’s single as a point of departure. Meanwhile, Reclaiming Venus: The Many Lives of Alvenia Bridges (Rising Action Press, 2024), addresses the systemic silencing of Black women’s voices in musical history by telling the story of Bridges’s personal journey when crossing paths with a wide variety of people in the entertainment industry, from long-term working relationships with the Rolling Stones and Roberta Flack to momentary yet extraordinary encounters with Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, and Tina Turner. Smith is also a visual artist and an avid hiker.

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