Originally published in the December 2005 issue of Fra Noi
This past summer, Paul Basile OFL (Our Fearless Leader) and Editor of “Fra Noi” received a fax from Anthony C. in Crete, Illinois asking him to ask me if Frank Sinatra ever sang or recorded an Italian song. I was very happy to receive the inquiry when Paul passed it on to me because I thought it would make a perfect column for the pages of “Fra Noi.” The question of Sinatra’s lack of recorded Italian music is one that I have pondered for years and has made me more than a little interested in researching which Italian American singers embraced their cultural roots to record Italian music and which artists seemed to shy away from recording the traditional Italian favorites.
In the world of entertainment, Italian American singers have held an exalted position for nearly a century. The names of many of these singers are names we’ve known all our lives: Sinatra, Como, Connie Francis, Dean Martin. Still others are more obscure: Nick Lucas, David Allyn, and Frances Wayne. Nevertheless, all are, or were, Americans of Italian descent and the melodies and rhythms of hundreds of years of Italian musical history went into shaping their talents.
For the past six years, I’ve had the privilege and joy to spotlight the musical contributions of Italian American singers, musicians, and songwriters on a weekly radio program called The Sunday Music Festa. The show is broadcast in Rochester, New York on Jazz 90.1 FM and can be heard every Sunday from 12:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time, live on the internet by going to Jazz90.1 and clicking onto the “Listen Live” link at the top of the page. When I proposed the show to the station’s manager back in 1999, I told him I wanted to host a show that would highlight the contributions of Italian Americans in the world of popular music and jazz. I actually said to him, “I’m not interested in playing Jerry Vale singing ‘Arriverderci Roma’ every week . . . not that there’s anything wrong with that.” Thus a rather unique, and what has happily proven to be a very popular, radio show was born.
As a fan of The Great American Songbook, which is the descriptive moniker given to the works of Porter, Mercer, Warren, Berlin, Kern, et al, I play a variety of great standards every week on the show by artists such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Bobby Darin, Julius La Rosa and many more. And while I don’t play nearly as many classic Italian songs on my show that doesn’t mean I don’t play any. We’ll often listen to Dino sing “Eh Marie” or Louie Prima belt out “Buona Sera” with Keely and Sam Butera. One of my favorites is Julius La Rosa’s rendition of “Just Say I Love Her” which has been recorded by numerous Italian singers. In fact, I’ve even played Jerry Vale’s “Arriverderci Roma” on occasion. Hosting a show like this has given me the opportunity to not only highlight the contributions of Italian American artists to America’s musical legacy but also identify the Italian American singers and musicians who used the experiences of their youth and heritage to put an American stamp on the tunes of sunny Italy.
There are four artists, in particular, who I refer to as “The Big Four” of Italian American singers. They are Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Dean Martin, and Tony Bennett. Whether you like them or not, no one can dispute the impact these four men have made on American music through the hundreds of millions of records they have sold.
Starting with Sinatra, he did record some Italian songs. However,in a recording career that lasted half a century and well over a thousand recordings, his output of Italian material is almost non-existent. The only recordings where you will find Sinatra singing in Italian go back to his Columbia Recordings of the 1940’s and early 1950’s. In November of 1945 Sinatra recorded “I Have But One Heart (O Marenariello).” The song was written by Marty Symes and Johnny Farrow and published by Barton Music, a company in which Sinatra had a financial interest. Although Sinatra’s recording of this song is now thought of as the most important, his rendition never reached the pop singles chart until September 20, 1947, approximately three weeks after the release of a recording of this same tune by a young singer named Vic Damone. Today, the song is probably most remembered as the song that the fictional Johnny Fontane sings at the wedding of Connie Corleone in the 1971 film, “The Godfather.”
In September of 1949 Sinatra went into the studios to record the theme to an upcoming Ingrid Bergman film entitled “Stromboli.” The song was written by Irving Taylor and Ken Lane. While Ken Lane was a fine pianist, and would cross paths with Sinatra many times in the future when he became Dean Martin’s accompanist and Musical Director, he and Irving Taylor were not exactly two paisans from the neighborhood. Nevertheless, the recording “(On the Island of) Stromboli” was one of Sinatra’s more pleasing of his late Columbia period and one that got somewhat overlooked because of the controversy surrounding the movie “Stromboli.” It was on this film that Ingrid Bergman met Roberto Rossellini and left her husband to “live in sin” with the Italian film director. It caused quite a stir at the time and nearly destroyed Bergman’s career.
In October of 1950 Sinatra recorded the one and only song he would ever sing in Italian from beginning to end, the Italian classic “Torna a Surriento” or “Come Back to Sorrento.” It’s not his greatest effort as he sounds uncertain of his footing. It could be because Sinatra was such a stickler for enunciation. His enunciation when singing in Italian sounds overdone as though he’s uncomfortable singing in a language other than his own. Many of the singers like Perry Como and Julius La Rosa said they grew up speaking Italian of some sort, usually dialect, to their immigrant parents. The same was probably not true of Frank Sinatra. His father owned a saloon and his mother was a political ward healer so both his parents were quite familiar with English. Therefore it seems unlikely that he would’ve been required to speak Italian to his parents as so many second generation children were. This could explain his discomfort with singing in Italian and perhaps his ultimate reluctance to record Italian music. While Frank Sinatra was unquestionably one of the greatest interpreter’s of American song he did not excel in the same way with the music of his ancestral fathers and his lack of output in this area seems to confirm his acknowledgement of this fact.
The only one of The Big Four who recorded even less Italian music that Sinatra is Tony Bennett. As far as I know, Tony Bennett has only recorded one Italian song is his prolific recording career, the 1972 Big Band arrangement of the traditional “O Sole Mio.” It’s on an album entitled “The Best of Tony Bennett” which has yet to be released on CD. Nevertheless, Bennett sang the song as recently as this past July at a concert in Umbria, Italy.
One drawback to the many Italian recordings of the 1950’s and 1960’s is that singers often recorded the same tunes. Some of the most popular and repeatedly recorded titles include “Eh Marie,” “I Have But One Heart,” “O Sole Mio,” “Torna Surriento,” and “Mala Femmena.” In 1966 Perry Como and his arranger/conductor Nick Perito decided to actually travel to Italy to record an album of Italian music. In addition to a few of the traditional favorites, Como and Perito managed to spice up the project with less familiar choices such as “Anema e core,” “Un giorno dopo l’altro,” “E Lei,” and the “Love Theme from ‘La Strada’” with English lyrics by Don Raye. The result was an album of exquisite taste and beauty, precisely what you’d expect from the man that America implored every week for over twenty years to “sing to me, Mr. C., sing to me.” With the exception of some of the Italian American novelty songs like “Chi Baba Chi Baba (My Bambino Go to Sleep),” the album selections on “Perry Como in Italy” made up the bulk of Como’s Italian discography. Of course, many Italian Americans are very possessive of the Latin hymn “Ave Maria” which was a staple of Como’s annual Christmas shows so if you want to give Perry credit for that, go right ahead.
Of The Big Four, Dean Martin, born Dino Crocetti, recorded far more Italian songs than his three prodigious counterparts. In fact, early in his career, long before “Everybody Loves Somebody,” Dean Martin bounded onto nightclub stages every night to the strains of “Eh Marie.” In his first few years of recording Martin made two separate versions of the song. The first version was cut in 1947 for a small label called Apollo Records. The arrangement is less sophisticated and Dean seems more casual than usual and jokes around quite a bit on the recording. The second version was recorded for Capital in 1952 with a much more professional arrangement and in the second chorus of the song, instead of comedy, Dean provides what could be described as a more American swing treatment to the song.
Dean recorded many Italian songs particularly in the first half of his recording career – the second half would be filled largely with Country & Western music which Dean loved and excelled in interpreting. In addition to the classic Italian favorites like “Santa Lucia,” “Come Back to Sorrento,” and “Non Dimenticar,” Dean was a master at the American Italian novelty songs like “Mambo Italiano,” “On An Evening in Roma,” and one of his biggest hits of all time, the Academy Award nominated “That’s Amore” written by Jack Brooks and Harry Warren (aka Salvatore Guaragna). While Dean’s pronunciation of Italian was anything but textbook authentic, his idiomatic and dialect filled interpretations were always infused with the relaxed sense of fun that was the synonymous with the name Dean Martin.
The great jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli once told me that the best Italian pronunciation he ever heard from an Italian American singer came from Julius La Rosa. The singer once told me that while he grew up speaking a Sicilian dialect, he later went back and took classes to learn the textbook Italian. La Rosa became a nationwide sensation in the early 1950’s with his appearances on “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” and a hit recording of “Eh Cumpari.” His fame grew when Godfrey fired him on the air in October of 1953 and although his vocal talents also grew; his star power never equaled his under-appreciated abilities as an interpreter of American song. Thankfully, there is a fair amount of Julius La Rosa music now available on CD. Do yourself a favor and discover, or re-discover, one of the best singers Italian America has ever produced.
There are a great many more Italian American singers who regularly included Italian songs in their repertoire as well as recording them: Vic Damone, Jerry Vale, Don Cornell, and Al Martino all spring to mind. And echoing Dean Martin’s talent with the Italian novelty number was Lou Monte. This Calabrese crooner’s songs were so funny that it’s difficult to decide whether to consider him a vocalist or a comedian. The truth is that while many of his biggest records were comedy numbers like “Pepino the Italian Mouse,” he was, in fact, a very able musician with a beautiful voice as showcased on a number like “Roman Guitar.”
Traditionally, there have been less Italian American female vocalists than male vocalists but there have been some and many of them very talented such as Jill Corey, Toni Arden, Frances Wayne, and Marlene Ver Planck. The popular vocalist of the 1950’s, Joni James (born Joan Babbo) recorded an entire Italian album of songs that is available on CD. However, when it comes to the female vocalists, no one recorded more Italian classics that Concetta Franconegro better known as Connie Francis. Francis recorded nearly a half-dozen albums of Italian songs and she ranks as one of the most successful recording artists in the history of music. It should not be difficult to find many of her Italian recordings on CD, especially her popular rendition of the sentimental Italian favorite, “Mama.”
Italian Americans have a great deal to be proud of when it comes to the subject of popular singers. Whether they sang the songs of their ancestors or not, it seems obvious that some passion for vocalizing was passed on to these sons and daughters of Italy. Whether you’re a fan of The Great American Songbook or The Great Italian Songbook, there’s a whole lot of recorded music out there to listen to and enjoy. In fact, even for a collector like myself there’s always something new. “The Solid Swing of Al Donahue and his Orchestra” is a brand new CD available through Collector’s Choice Music. Included on the CD are four vocals by Phil Brito, an early Italian American crooner who had an influence on singers such as Dean Martin.
Whatever your tastes go out and enjoy the songs of Italy and America sung by our Italian American paesani and as my mother always says, “canta, canta!”
