Jean-Louis Murat

Jean-Louis Bergheaud (28 January 1952 – 25 May 2023), better known by the stage name Jean-Louis Murat, was a French musician. Jean-Louis Bergheaud was born in Chamalières, France to a father who was a carpenter and a non-professional musician. Further to his parents' divorce, he spent his whole youth in the isolated farm of his grandparents in Murat-le-Quaire, a village overviewing the thermal city of La Bourboule. From his earliest days, solitary and introverted, Jean-Louis Murat showed he was gifted in music and with many instruments, which will lead him to the local wind section at the age of 7 with his father, then to the conservatory brass class where he will improve his talent for singing too. At the same time at 15, his English teacher let him discover soul and jazz music and he met several blues artists such as John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker or Memphis Slim. Thanks to his English teacher, he continued studying against his father's advice. Keen on poetry as well as romantic and upheaval literature amongst others, Oscar Wilde, André Gide, D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov, he was the first member of his family to pass the Baccalauréat. Married at the age of 17, he joined the University of Clermont-Ferrand for a short period of time; he had a son and divorced when he was 19 and left in order to travel, living by doing odd jobs in France and around Europe all by himself, in the style of Jack Kerouac. He held a couple of positions between Paris and several French tourist spots; he was ski instructor in Avoriaz and a beach attendant in Saint-Tropez, and he finally went back to his village in 1977 at the age of 23 and devoted himself to music.