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French racing cyclist Jean Graczyk kisses accordionist Yvette Horner during the 12th stage of the Tour de France between Luchon and Toulouse, on July 7, 1960.AFP/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

When George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward were writing Summertime, the evocative Porgy and Bess aria, they probably never imagined that it would one day be performed by a British pop singer known for androgynous outfits and a 71-year-old Frenchwoman with red-orange hair playing an accordion.

Yet, for that woman, Yvette Horner, accompanying Boy George on Summertime in 1994 on the French television program Taratata was just one moment in a deliciously eclectic career. She played at high-end Paris fashion shows. She appeared in Maurice Béjart’s reimagining of The Nutcracker.

But her considerable legend was rooted in the years she spent as a distinctive part of the grand caravan that accompanies the Tour de France, the sprawling French bicycle race. For more than a decade in the 1950s and 60s, she played for the crowds from atop one vehicle or another as the caravan made its way along the tour route ahead of the cyclists.

Ms. Horner died on Monday, her agent, Jean-Pierre Brun, announced. She was 95.

After establishing herself on the tour caravan, Ms. Horner recorded scores of albums and played in countless nightclubs and concert halls. In the 1980s, her career took on a new life when fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier essentially gave her a makeover.

Her dark hair became vivid red-orange and Mr. Gaultier decked her out in elaborate gowns and costumes. The effect was a kitschy sort of cool.

Ms. Horner was still recording into this decade.

“I cannot do without music,” she said while promoting her album Yvette Hors Norme in 2012. “The bellows of my accordion is like a beating of my heart.”

Yvette Hornère was born Sept. 22, 1922, in Tarbes, in southwestern France. Her family owned a theatre and she was exposed to music and performing from infancy.

By the age of 4, she was taking piano lessons. She first encountered the accordion when the family took a trip to the South of France; an accordionist in a casino there showed her how to play the instrument.

In 1948, in Switzerland, she won the top prize at an international accordion competition and, in 1952, at the suggestion of her husband, René Droesch, she made her first of 11 rides in the caravan.

The caravan was certainly good for the young accordionist, who had adopted the name Horner in her early 20s, thinking it might be more commercial. But the hours under the sun took a toll on her skin: She said she was constantly sunburned. One year, someone advised her to smear fat on her face and lips.

“I noticed that everyone was pointing at me and laughing,” she told the newspaper La Dépêche in 2015. “I then looked in the rearview mirror of a car and I understood. I had plenty of mosquitoes stuck on my face.”

Good accordion playing, she once said, was a matter not of reading sheet music, but of having “a palette of colors, sounds.” Her musical palette was expansive. Her numerous albums – more than 150, by some counts – delved into Spanish music, pop, rock, rap, jazz, American country and more.

A few years after her husband’s death in the mid-1980s, Ms. Horner found a renewed sense of adventurousness. Mr. Gaultier created some attention-getting outfits for her and featured her music at runway shows.

In 1998, when Mr. Béjart, the choreographer, created a version of The Nutcracker>, Ms. Horner turned up as an accordion-playing fairy godmother.

Information on who Ms. Horner leaveswas not immediately available.

New York Times News Service

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