Records: Nun’s Story

Two years ago, a battered, rattling two-cylinder Citroën stopped outside the offices of the Philips record company in Brussels, and two nuns got out. Inside, the older one did all the talking. “You see, we have these retreats for young girls at our Fichermont monastery, and in the evenings we sing songs composed by Sister Luc-Gabrielle here.” She gestured at her round-faced, bespectacled companion. “The songs are such a hit with our girls, they ask us to transcribe them.” Would the company make a record and a hundred or so copies, which the sisters could give as gifts? The sisters were ready to pay. Sorry, said the record men in effect, you have hit us during the Christmas rush.

Slipstream. Three months later, the nuns tried phoning. Would the company make the records now? Philips gave in, and Sister Luc-Gabrielle arrived with a new guitar and a chorus of four, habited in black and white. During recording sessions, Sister Luc-Gabrielle made little nunnish jokes to ease the strain, and at lunchtime all five sisters would repair to a nearby monastery for prayer and refreshment.

When Philips executives heard the recorded songs, they flipped. The songs of Sister Luc-Gabrielle were light, melodic, and as gently pleasing as the sounds of a country evening. Instead of the few pressings requested, Philips turned out thousands, sent them out into the commercial slipstream as the album of “Soeur Sourire” (Sister Smile). Almost instantly, Soeur Sourire became a byword throughout Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Spain, Canada, Switzerland and Germany.

Well Adapted. But when Philips tried the album—calling it The Singing Nun—in the U.S. last summer, it went nowhere. Philips then tried an old sales stimulus, taking two songs from it and putting out a 45-r.p.m. single. One side is called Dominique, and it has taken off like a grass fire. U.S. teen-agers are mad for the singing nun, even though Dominique is in French, and few are aware that the song lauds the virtues of the founder of the Dominican order. More than 400,000 have sold in three weeks, and the full Singing Nun album, thus primed, has now sold 300,000.

Sister Luc-Gabrielle is 30, blue-eyed, friendly and full of common sense. She is an odd competitor for the Bobby Darins and the Paul Ankas, as anyone would agree who could see her in her heavy shoes and grey apron with a big knife cleaning sugar beets on the convent farm. “She’s wonderfully well adapted to Dominican life,” says a fellow sister who acts as her manager. “She’s very joyful, and holy joy is the principal trait St. Dominic wanted to infuse in his order.”

The songs will eventually earn about $100,000 for the Dominicans. The money will be spent on foreign missions, including one to South America, where Sister Luc-Gabrielle will be sent when she finishes her training. Meanwhile, when reporters and photographers seek her out, she shies away. “I don’t like all that,” she says. “Missionary work is far more important.”