Edith Lefel

The story so far.

Written and edited by Smokiller

Edith Lefel was a zouk singer born in Cayenne to a Martinican father and a Guianese mother, according to Outre-mer La 1ère. L'Humanité, reporting her death, called her one of the great voices of Creole music and placed her alongside Tanya Saint-Val and Jocelyne Béroard as a leading trio of Antillean women singers. The paper credited her with six albums mixing zouk, biguine and ragga, and named La Sirène and Marie among her signature songs. She died of a heart attack on 20 January 2003 at the hospital in Dreux, aged 39. In 2011 France-Antilles covered the unveiling of a black stone stele on her grave at Père-Lachaise in Paris, funded with help from Ronald Rubinel, the father of her children, and the Guiana regional council. The stele carries a line from her song Mési. Her Deezer catalogue includes La klé, À fleur de peau and Si seulement, and La 1ère reported a tribute evening held at the Ministry of Overseas France in February 2015.