Fernande by Georges Brassens (1972)

Brassens found the refrain while driving to Paimpol and built the song around it for the 1972 album that bears its name: a lonely man's lullaby in which the names he summons produce, or fail to produce, the expected result. The moral arrives in the last verse and is the most quoted line, that an erection, papa, cannot be ordered. It is sung the way Brassens sang everything, quietly, with a guitar and a moustache, like a philosopher reporting on his own plumbing.

Twenty years earlier Le Gorille had been formally censored; Fernande caused a stir but no ban, which says something about 1972 and something about Brassens' standing by then. It was quoted in Les Bronzés font du ski in 1979 and in Un crime au Paradis in 2001, and it has been covered by Maxime Le Forestier, Carla Bruni and Alexis HK, three generations each deciding the refrain was worth saying again, into a microphone.

Its afterlife is respectability. Fernande is a chanson paillarde, a bawdy song, written by a man whose work is taught in schools, and it is the entry that proves the organ belongs in the canon as long as the person singing about it is Brassens. Every French comedian who has since rhymed on "bander" is quoting him, whether they know it or not.