Felice Scaduto Bryant

YOU MAY NOT KNOW THE NAME FELICE BRYANT, BUT YOU KNOW THE MUSIC that she and husband Boudleaux Bryant created. As the first independent songwriters in Nashville, they took the city by storm in the 1950s, playing a large role in its becoming Music City, USA. In so doing, they also created a body of music that made its way around the globe. Songs like “Bye Bye Love,” “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” “Love Hurts,” and “Rocky Top” captivated listeners and inspired young musicians everywhere, not only during the decades in which they were written but ever since. Hailing from dramatically different regions of the United States, they were two complete strangers from wholly disparate cultural backgrounds: he a small-town southern boy from Moultrie, Georgia, she a Milwaukee native of Sicilian background. A chance encounter in Milwaukee sparked the love match that became the Boudleaux and Felice Bryant story.

Although they had little in common as children, Felice and Boudleaux grew up during the decades when—propelled by radio, recording, and movies—commercial popular music and entertainment exploded in American culture. Their romance immediately inaugurated an intimate companionship that ultimately produced thousands of songs in their long and mutually supportive songwriting career. They played a significant role in shaping the development of three genres of mid-twentieth-century American music—country, rock and roll, and pop—and were the first people to move to Nashville solely with the intent to write songs and to make a living from the profession. Although Boudleaux was a classically trained musician, he wouldn’t have become a songwriter without Felice. Her talents began to develop back in her Milwaukee childhood days when she was known as Tillie Scaduto.

Matilda Genevieve Scaduto (later known as Felice) was born at Saint Mary’s Hospital in Milwaukee on August 7, 1925, to Salvatore Philip (Sam) Scaduto, age thirty-one, and Katherine Loverdi Scaduto, age nineteen.[1] The suave and captivating Salvatore, a barber from the Sicilian village of Bagheria, arrived in Milwaukee in 1913. He was among many of his fellow countrymen who had been emigrating since the 1880s as the Italian economy was floundering. Like Salvatore, most Italians settling in the city came from the vicinity of Palermo.[2] Although Katherine was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, her parents also emigrated from Sicily before moving to Milwaukee. Through his service in World War I, Salvatore earned his citizenship. In 1921, his barber shop was located just blocks from the main streets of downtown Milwaukee at the northern border of the Third Ward neighborhood, the area of first settlement for Italian immigrants.[3]

The First Ward (now Riverwest), where Felice and her older sister, Kitty, spent their earliest years, was settled in the 1880s by Germans, but their Polish neighbors soon began outnumbering them. By the 1920s, Italian families moved from the Third Ward to join the Poles. They built modest single-story frame homes, often adding to the original structures by raising them to build basement apartments underneath. Here and in the historic South Side, these houses with their additions became known as “Polish flats.”[4] The Scadutos’ home on the east side of North Humboldt Boulevard may have had this configuration; the Scadutos rented an apartment in the house where Felice’s maternal grandparents, the Loverdis, lived. Her father and grandfather also shared a barbershop there at the time of Felice’s birth. Felice often spoke of growing up “in a very Italian family in an almost Italian neighborhood.”[5]

Growing up in this mixed immigrant haven, Felice listened to the different musical sounds that “would just filter out on the street in