19The song Petit Papa Noël was born in the cinema in 1946 in the film Fates de Richard Pottier. Tino Rossi had to perform a gospel song on stage, surrounded by a children's choir. These having failed him, he had to improvise. Henri martinet, the pianist of Tino Rossi of the time, then remembered a song written two years earlier for a review at the Odeon theater à Marseille in which a child asked the Père Noël to free his father, a prisoner of war. Raymond Vincy, the lyricist of Tino Rossi, removed the harsh passages from the original text to make it the great timeless classic that we still know today. Many singers have recorded “Small Santa " since its creation, including Florent Pagny in 2000.
