The Strange Album That Topped the Charts After JFK's Assassination

It shouldn’t come as a big surprise that the songs on the Clear Channel-approved oldies stations aren’t necessarily the cream of the crop, or even the most popular songs from their era. Some number-one hits launched careers and echo through pop culture as “Beatlemania,” while others become cultural ephemera—destined for obscurity until resurfacing on a Wes Anderson soundtrack or musty Trivial Pursuit card in a bar.

It’s a mystery why some songs enjoy popularity even briefly—“Purple People Eater,” America? Really?—but there’s an explanation for how a Belgian nun singing in French about St. Dominic topped the Billboard charts for four weeks in 1963: She was the soundtrack of America in mourning.

Obviously any statement about “America” doing anything comes with a big fat caveat—I don’t need to remind you that being a young, handsome president with a beautiful family doesn’t translate into 100 percent popularity. But as so many thick servings of Baby Boomer nostalgia have reinforced the notion that the Kennedy assassination was a cultural watershed I-remember-where-I-was-when moment, it doesn’t feel like a stretch when people link an anomaly like the only Belgian number-one hit in American history with such a singular event.

In his book Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties, W.J. Rorabaugh writes:

“For the month after the assassination, the pop charts were dominated by a strange record called The Singing Nun. The Belgian Sister Luc-Gabrielle, who spoke no English, sang relgious songs in French. Although few Americans could follow the lyrics, the beautiful melodies were not an inappropriate form of mourning for a Catholic president and his francophone wife.”

The single was called “Dominique” and it delivers exactly as promised: lilting nun voices, gently harmonizing over dulcet, nylon-string guitar. This stuff is as soft as it was popular, and mon dieu, it was it both. You can still find copies of The Singing Nun LP wherever old, unheralded records are sold, generally in between some Streisand and the Ray Conniff Singers. If you need proof that popularity and cultural durability are disconnected, note that “Dominique” was the million-unit selling, number-one juggernaut that The Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” couldn’t unseat—yet which one is shorthand for the era now?

Sister Luc-Gabrielle and four of her fellow nuns from the Fichermont Convent in Brussels recorded the album in early 1963 for the convent’s private use. Somewhere in the process, Philips Records executives heard commercial appeal and convinced the nuns to release the songs commercially under the name Soeur Sourire: the smiling sister.

The album became a hit in Europe, and then was re-christened with an English name, and came to America. Within two years, ''Dominique'' made at least $100,000 in royalties that all went to the convent; the song became a hit of the saddest variety and Luc-Gabrielle performed live on Ed Sullivan in January, just before “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” came to America.

This is where the singing nun’s story takes a turn, just as she leaves the cultural radar. Amidst disagreement with the Catholic Church she left the convent in 1966, and began singing under the stage name Luc Dominique. She released albums in 1967 and 1968 called I Am Not A Star and Dominican and a single that was perhaps the swingingiest tribute to the birth control pill ever recorded. Why that song isn’t shorthand for the 1960s is truly an equal mystery.

But she never topped the success she had experienced under the name "The Singing Nun," yet she was forbidden to return to it. After all she wasn't a nun anymore, she stopped smiling and mostly stopped singing. Giving up on show business, she returned to name her parents gave her, Jeanine Decker. Leaving the convent meant leaving behind not only her name, but her whole social world. “When I left the convent in 1967, I suffered from what I call ‘sister syndrome,’” she told UPI. “People wouldn’t talk to me because they didn’t know how to react when I wasn’t wearing a habit.” It goes down from there.

She tried to open a home for handicapped children but, since all the money from “Dominique” went to her old convent, she had to close it due to lack of funds. Under the weight from name changes, lifestyle changes, and increasing financial pressure, Decker suffered a nervous breakdown and started psychotherapy while living off her income from being a guitar teacher.

Owing back taxes on those now-long-donated and therefore gone earnings, she recorded an electro-disco version of her hit in 1983. Without a presidential assassination to whet America’s appetite, it didn’t have the same impact. It’s also pretty awful.

In interviews in the 1970s, Decker hints at a darkness behind her gentle voice—the cheerful confidence of her album revealed as a long-discarded persona. In 1985, she and a friend committed suicide in their apartment with “a massive dose of barbiturates swallowed with alcohol.” They requested to be buried according to Catholic rituals, having kept the faith even after living in the convent became impossible.

The link has been made—and debated—between Kennedy’s death and the rise of the Beatles. “It came to seem that Kennedy’s murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out,” said Lance Morrow. “It was no accident that the Beatles had their overwhelmingly successful Ed Sullivan Show debut shortly after JFK was shot,” wrote Lester Bangs.

Once the shock wore off though, the British Invasion, Bob Dylan and psychedelia wiped the slate clean as the Baby Boomers, apparently innocent of how a boom in babies happens, showed the world how to have sex—or at least that’s the story that’s told. But the soundtrack of December 1963 is a jubilant “Dominique a-nique, a-nique,” and a grateful song to the Lord, even if no one really remembers it that way.