Amore: The Story of Italian American Song

By Mark Rotella

Amore is Mark Rotella's celebration of the "Italian decade"—the years after the war and before the Beatles when Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Dean Martin, and Tony Bennett, among others, won the hearts of the American public with a smooth, stylish, classy brand of pop. In Rotella's vivid telling, the stories behind forty Italian American classics (from "O Sole Mio," "Night and Day," and "Mack the Knife" to "Volare" and "I Wonder Why") show how a glorious musical tradition became the sound track of postwar America and the expression of a sense of style that we still cherish.

Rotella follows the music from the opera houses and piazzas of southern Italy, to the barrooms of the Bronx and Hoboken, to the Copacabana, the Paramount Theatre, and the Vegas Strip. He shows us the hardworking musicians whose voices were to become ubiquitous on jukeboxes and the radio and whose names—some anglicized, some not—have become bywords for Italian American success, even as they were dogged by stereotypes and prejudice.

Amore is the personal Top 40 of one proud son of Italy; it is also a love song to Italian American culture and an evocation of an age that belongs to us all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Sep 14, 2010
• ISBN: 9781429978477

Mark Rotella

Mark Rotella is the author of Stolen Figs and Other Adventures in Calabria (NPP, 2003). A senior reviews editor at Publishers Weekly, he lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife and their two children.

Book preview

Part One

The Old Country

1

I Have But One Heart (O marenariello)

FRANK SINATRA AND VIC DAMONE

Frank Sinatra tossed his cards on the table.

I fold, he said. He was playing poker at a friend’s apartment in Manhattan. It was the summer of 1946, and WHN was broadcasting a game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. That evening’s hard rain had delayed the game, and music filled the gap.

The smoke from cigars and cigarettes rose from the table; whiskey-soaked ice clinked in glasses.

Night and Day came on the radio, the Cole Porter song from the musical Gay Divorcee.

Hey, Frankie. Is that you? asked his friend Sammy Cahn, the composer and songwriter.

Yup, Sinatra answered, still concentrating on the game. Jimmy Van Heusen, another songwriter, nodded in agreement. Sinatra had had a hit with his version of the song, arranged by Axel Stordahl, in 1942 and again in 1944.

They continued to play, and at the song’s end the radio announcer said: And that was the voice of Vic Damone.

Who? Sinatra said, pushing his chair back. What the hell did he just say?

Sinatra got up from the table, picked up the phone, and dialed the radio station.

This is Frank Sinatra, and I want to speak with this Vic Damone, he demanded.

The announcer tapped on the booth where Damone, backed by a small ensemble, had just finished singing. Some guy says he’s Frank Sinatra wants to talk with you.

"Yeah, like Frank Sinatra is going to call me," Damone said. It must be the guys back in Brooklyn, he thought, playing a prank. He picked up the line.

This is Frank Sinatra, and I want you to stop singing my songs.

Yeah, if you’re Frank Sinatra, then I’m the pope.

Damone, laughing, hung up on the man known to everyone in the music world simply as The Voice.

That’s how Vic Damone told me the story one day nearly sixty years later.

I was imitating him. That day, I was live on the radio. I paid an arranger to copy Sinatra’s Stordahl arrangements, and I was singing it live. All of us singers then wanted to sound like him.

We were talking on the telephone. A few weeks earlier I had sent Damone a letter, along with a book I had written. In the letter I asked for an interview. I didn’t expect to hear back from him: the word was that he had retired from show business after suffering a stroke a couple of years earlier, and that he hadn’t spoken with writers in some time. One night I came home to a message on the answering machine: Hello. This is Vic Damone. I was a singer—am a singer. I got your letter, and I’d be happy to talk with you.

I played the message several times, listening to the voice, at once humble and confident, over and over. The voice that generations of people had heard on the radio and in concert halls was now on my answering machine—in my home. I felt I had reached right back to the late 1940s, when the voice of Vic Damone and singers like him filled the homes of people across America with music—Italian American music.

Within four months of each other in 1947, Frank Sinatra and Vic Damone released versions of I Have But One Heart. It was a song in English, based on an Italian folk song called O marenariello (The Sailor). Damone’s version came out first. He was eighteen years old, and it was the first song he recorded for a major label, Mercury. Released May 30, it went up to number seven on the Billboard charts—just months after he had sung during the Dodgers-Giants rain delay, and before anyone outside of Brooklyn had ever heard of him—and stayed there for seven weeks. On September 20, Sinatra released his version, which stayed on the charts for just two weeks, reaching only number thirteen. Judging by Damone’s numbers, his version was filling living rooms across the country, making its way into the hearts of teenage girls.

The competition certainly wasn’t a catalyst for Damone’s rise or Sinatra’s fall. But it reflected a change in a momentous year for both singers. For one thing, Sinatra, thirty-one years old and no longer the young darling, was starting to get bad press—for being a Communist, according to conservatives then coming into power; for being linked to the Mafia; for cheating on his wife; and for lashing out, both verbally and physically, at reporters.

For another, that same year Italian Americans, long a poor and embattled minority, began entering public consciousness en masse. Nearly seven million Americans of Italian descent were living in the United States. For decades they had lived in neighborhoods of their own, enclaves within the big cities. Suddenly they were visible nationwide.

In boxing that summer, titles had been won and lost by Italian Americans within a couple of months of each other. In July, Rocky Graziano (given name: Thomas Rocco Barbella) won the world middleweight title against the Polish American Tony Zale, and a month later Willie Pep (Guglielmo Papaleo) successfully defended his world featherweight title against Jock Leslie. The middleweight Jake LaMotta (Giacobbe LaMotta) lost to Billy Fox. In September, Joey Maxim (Giuseppe Antonio Berardinelli) defeated Clarence Jones, and Roland La Starza knocked out Jim Johnson. That year, Rocco Francis Marchegiano fought his first professional bout under the name Rocky Mack. He soon changed his name to Rocky Marciano, and he would become the only undefeated heavyweight champion in history.

But it was a trio of figures who would be recognized forever among the great Americans of the twentieth century: La Guardia, DiMaggio, and Sinatra.

In 1947 those three names rolled off the tongues of Americans as never before. And Italian Americans in New York and throughout the country wore those names like badges of honor, signs that they, and their people, had made it in America.

Fiorello La Guardia—known as the Little Flower on account of his first name and his size (he was just over five feet tall)—had served as mayor of New York City from 1934 until 1945. He held the city’s hand through both the Great Depression and World War II. He was America’s first Italian American mayor of a major city.

Born in 1882 on Varick Street in Greenwich Village to an Italian father (whose family came from Apulia and Sicily) and a Jewish mother from Trieste (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), La Guardia grew up Episcopalian and spent his early childhood in the Arizona Territory. In his late twenties, he worked as a translator at Ellis Island, becoming a champion of the little guy, the voice of the immigrant and the labor unions. In time, he became a congressman, representing Italian American East Harlem, and then, on the Fusion ticket, was elected mayor of New York City.

After declining to run for a fourth term as mayor, La Guardia stayed in the public eye, serving on various boards and committees, but two years after leaving office, on September 20, 1947, he died of pancreatic cancer. Nearly forty thousand mourners filed past his open casket the next day at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in upper Manhattan.

On September 30, Joe DiMaggio, a Sicilian fisherman’s son from San Francisco, played in the first televised World Series as the Yankees faced the Brooklyn Dodgers. The big story was the presence of Jackie Robinson, who had joined the Dodgers that season, breaking baseball’s color line. But there were plenty of Italian Americans on both sides: Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, and Vic Raschi playing for the Yankees; Carl Furillo, Ralph Branca, Al Gionfriddo, Cookie Lavagetto, and Vic Lombardi for the Dodgers. In game six, Gionfriddo caught a DiMaggio fly ball at the wall in Yankee Stadium, denying him a home run and forcing a game seven. The Yankees won the series, and DiMaggio earned his third American League Most Valuable Player