In this article, I explore how American popular culture – and especially music – provided a rich yet problematic source of inspiration for Roberto Leydi and Giovanna Marini, among other leftist intellectuals and artists of the 1960s Italian ‘folk revival’, as they adapted its forms to fit their own political exigencies. Scholarship on American influence on postwar Italian society has focused on diverse aspects of this phenomenon, from the role of television and consumerism (Gundle Reference Gundle1996) to rock music and youth culture (Portelli Reference Portelli and Carpitella1978; Carrera Reference Carrera1980; Fiori Reference Fiori1984; Minganti Reference Minganti, Fehrenbach and Poiger2000). However, the role of this influence on the mid-century Italian folk revival, and on the renewed Italian interest in and political use of oral traditions in general, remains under-examined. While by no means the only catalyst for the Italian folk revival, for some intellectuals and artists, American folk music provided forms that were translatable into an Italian context and that constituted an important locus of cultural exchange. The aim of this article is not to provide an explication of all examples of American influence in the Italian folk movement but rather to scrutinise this phenomenon in greater depth through two particular case studies.
My discussion begins with Alan Lomax's seminal eight-month research trip in Italy, which made important contributions to the Italian folk movement, and his connection with Roberto Leydi. I explore the questions Lomax's role provoked, as intellectuals like Leydi and Gianni Bosio split over the value of American models. After a brief survey of how other Italian folk revival artists and performances utilised Lomax's materials and American musical styles, I examine the role of American influence on the early career of musician and researcher Giovanna Marini and on her first original album, the Reference Marini1966 political ballad Vi parlo dell'America (I Speak to You of America). Marini's lived experience in Cambridge, Massachusetts, drove her paradoxically to adapt American musical influences to reject American society at large, and the resulting album reflects the radicalisation of the folk revival by the mid 1960s. Through my examination of this adaptation of American music to suit Italian political needs, I add to our understanding of the complexity of this cultural influence in postwar Western Europe, specifically in Italy and on the Italian left. These examples suggest that American music, especially the styles produced by traditionally marginalised Americans, could be readily consumed and adapted by people who otherwise rejected the core values of mainstream American culture and politics. To support my analysis, I rely on previous scholarship on American influence in Italy and on the folk revival, unpublished letters and documents from the archive of the Istituto Ernesto De Martino in Sesto Fiorentino, and published interviews with Leydi and Marini.
This process needs to be situated within the larger context of American influence in post-World War II Italy, which necessitates a brief summary here. In his examination of the impact of American culture on consumerism and television in Italy, Stephen Gundle (Reference Gundle1996) argued that within Europe, Italy was the most receptive country to American cultural influence, and he attributed this receptiveness to a ‘cultural gap’ created by rapid industrialisation and the absence of a strong national culture in the wake of Fascism. Driven in large part by the shifting practices of consumption, American music, films, literature, television and words crept into Italian daily life at different rates and with different attentive audiences. However, scholars have also demonstrated that this phenomenon did not constitute a monolithic cultural colonisation of Italy. Rather, Italian artists, intellectuals and adolescents adapted American models to fit new contexts, mediating them with Italian (as well as French and British) ones and investing them with new meaning. Umberto Eco divided these American prototypes into two types: product models to be copied and technical models, which offered a ‘luogo di simulazione’ (site of simulation) to be adapted to new contexts (Eco Reference Eco, Ceserani, Eco and Placido1984, pp. 3–4). The concept of this second productive model is useful for understanding American influence in the cultural productions of Leydi and Marini. Dominque Fernandez (Reference Fernandez1969, p. 33) has explored how, as far back as 1930, Italian writers like Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini looked to American realist literature for ‘nuovi mezzi di espressione per tradurre le nuove realtà dell'uomo’ (‘new means of expression to translate the new realities of man’). Claudio Antonelli (Reference Antonelli2008) questions how the criticism and translation of this literature came to symbolise cultural resistance to Fascism, although this symbolism often oversimplified authors’ personal political histories and the Fascist regime's ambivalent stance towards the USA. Alessandro Carrera (Reference Carrera1980), Umberto Fiori (Reference Fiori1984) and Alessandro Portelli (Reference Portelli and Carpitella1978, Reference Portelli1985) have explored the arrival and proliferation of rock and roll in Italy; how Italian adolescents, even unconsciously, adapted its symbols to express rebellion and resistance; and the music's ambiguous association with leftist, even communist, politics. Franco Minganti has argued that the culture of covering American rock songs and use of American styles constituted a ‘counterhegemonic’ practice: ‘While strategically acknowledging the New and absorbing it into the mainstream of Tradition, careful not to change the latter significantly, one may end up expressing refusal of a culture by means of that culture's own syntax’ (Minganti Reference Minganti, Kroes, Rydell, Bosscher and Sears1993, 141; Reference Minganti, Fehrenbach and Poiger2000, 161).
Over this infiltration of American culture into Italian daily life loomed the spectre of US foreign policy in the context of the Cold War, including American involvement in Italian domestic politics. As Portelli writes, Italians saw the USA as ‘la bomba atomica, la Coca Cola, il dollaro’ (‘the atomic bomb, Coca-Cola, the dollar’) (Portelli Reference Portelli1985, p. 136). Leftist critique of the USA intensified in the 1960s with the escalation of American military involvement around the world, including the Cuban missile crisis and the war in Vietnam. The American role in Italian politics has been well documented by scholars. John L. Harper (Reference Harper1986) has studied how, between 1945 and 1948, the USA intervened in Italian governmental operations in an attempt to determine the political and economic identity of the new Italian republic and to solidify an alliance between the USA and the centre-right against the parties of the left, especially the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the largest in Western Europe. Alan A. Platt and Robert Leonardi (Reference Platt and Leonardi1978) detail how this alliance endured through the 1970s and shaped elections and policy to keep the PCI from participating in government, including US$65 million of financial support to centre-right parties, individuals, and organisations. By the 1970s, this support extended to far-right groups and individuals close to the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement, or MSI (Platt and Leonardi Reference Platt and Leonardi1978, p. 211). Italian leftists who criticised US military operations in Vietnam and around the world spoke as people who had experienced American intervention in their own country's operations since 1945. The consequences of American foreign policy thus provide an important political context for the interaction between the intellectuals and musicians of the folk revival and American culture.
The protagonists of the Italian ‘folk revival’ also adapted American models, and the complexity of this relationship deserves further exploration. By Italian ‘folk revival’, I refer to the period of intellectual and artistic interest in oral musical traditions that – following similar movements in the USA in the 1940s and Great Britain in the immediate postwar – stirred in Italy in the 1950s, developed into a forceful political movement in the 1960s, and proliferated on television screens and mainstream recorded albums in the 1970s. Even as I explore the role of American influence here, I must also underscore the complex intersection of cultural production and research that contributed to this movement, including Antonio Gramsci's theories on popular culture, the radical anthropology of Ernesto de Martino, the ethnomusicology of Diego Carpitella and Alberto Mario Cirese, and the innovative political songwriting and recuperation of the Resistance by the Cantacronache musical group, among others.Footnote 1
Indeed, the Italian movement was not a simple imitation of its American and British predecessors. It exhibited many original aspects, including, as Jacopo Tomatis (Reference Tomatis and Plastino2016) and Antonio Fanelli (Reference Fanelli2017) have noted, an intense synergy of rural and urban field research, the effort, on the part of both artists and intellectuals, to connect this research to new musical composition and the political use of these cultural productions in an attempt to transform Italian society. Recent scholarship on the folk revival, particularly a proliferation of work in Italy, testifies to the diverse influences on this movement. Goffredo Plastino's Reference Plastino2016 anthology compiles 20 years of accounts from the revival alongside contemporary interviews and scholarly analysis of the phenomenon in diverse regions across Italy, including Tomatis's examination of how the linguistic categories of the folk revival betray its ideological anxieties. Rachel Haworth (Reference Haworth2015) has explored the cross-pollination of styles and concerns about authenticity between the chanson française and the canzone d'autore, giving particular attention to the work of Cantacronache. Domenico Ferraro's Reference Ferraro2015 biography of Leydi testifies to how the ethnomusicologist's interests evolved beyond his early passion for American culture. Finally, Fanelli (Reference Fanelli2017), synthesising 100 years of political song in Italy, contextualises this movement within a larger exploration of the use of oral traditions within anthropology, ethnomusicology, and militant activism and underlines its interdisciplinary impact. Within this scholarship, Fanelli, Ferraro and Tomatis have touched upon the role of American culture in the folk revival, but the topic remains largely unexplored.
Given this context, using the term ‘folk revival’ to refer to this movement threatens to diminish its complexity and its original elements. In using ‘folk’ as the best shorthand for a complex movement, I follow the examples set by Carpitella (Reference Carpitella1992) and Leydi (Reference Leydi1972), as well as Plastino (Reference Plastino2016), who defended it against the myriad and vague variations on ‘world music’ and ‘la musica popolare’ available in contemporary usage. The use of this term during the revival itself reveals the influence of the earlier American folk movement on how the Italian one was conceived and understood, even by some of its central participants. As Tomatis has shown, ‘folk’ as a descriptor was not embraced by Leydi and others until the 1970s. Earlier, it had been avoided in part to emphasise the Italian version's originality and lack of commercialisation (2016, p. 1064). This shift in usage further underscores the tensions in this transatlantic relationship and the early reluctance of some folk revival intellectuals to cite their use of Anglophone sources.
I focus here on the influence of American culture in the middle, militant phase of this revival in the 1960s. This iteration was spearheaded by the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano (NCI), a group of intellectuals and musicians who believed that the documentation, analysis and performance of folk culture amplify the voices of the lower classes and provide a means to social justice. Founded in Milan in 1962 by Leydi and Gianni Bosio – a socialist intellectual and editor – it soon grew to include a journal, a record label, a performance group and an important audio archive, the Istituto Ernesto de Martino. By 1969, the NCI had produced 569 performances across Italy, collaborating with artists like poet Franco Fortini and playwright Dario Fo (Bermani Reference Bermani and Bermani1993). By late 1966 they had already produced over 100,000 copies of 82 albums and by 1973 they had built a formidable collection of over 160 distinct records.Footnote 2 Their success spawned imitators across Italy with varying degrees of political commitment, and the proliferation of artists engaging with folk materials and their televised appearances would further stimulate the more commercial iteration of the folk revival in the 1970s.
The group's many anti-war, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist projects might at first obscure the complex role that American influence played in the activities of the NCI. Some examples include songs like Rudi Assuntino's call to end Italian support of American militarism, ‘La rossa provvidenza (Le basi americane)’ [‘Red Providence (The American Bases)’] and performances like Chitarre contro la guerra (1967) (Guitars Against War) and Il Vietnam è qui (1967) (Vietnam is Here). Yet Assuntino had also recorded translations of Bob Dylan's ‘Masters of War’ and P.F. Sloan's ‘Eve of Destruction’. While these performances took a hard stance against American militarism and the war in Vietnam, they utilised pieces from American militant movements, including the hymn-turned-protest anthem ‘We Shall Overcome’ and a documentary prominently featuring a speech by Malcolm X. Indeed, from the very conception of the NCI, the adaptation of American influences and the rejection of American capitalism and militarism characterised an important part of its artistic production.
Alan Lomax, Roberto Leydi and the ‘other’ America
We can trace the role of American folk practices on the early activities of the NCI to co-founder Leydi and the impact of Alan Lomax's work in Italy. Lomax had arrived in Italy in 1954 with the goal of recording Italian oral traditions in every region, a project funded by Columbia Records and the BBC. Lomax problematically considered himself a ‘kind of musical Columbus in reverse’, an outsider uncovering practices that had always been present but not documented (Lomax Reference Lomax1960). Despite the colonial implications of an American ‘discovering’ Italian traditions, the significance of Lomax's project is corroborated by the Italian scholars who used his work. For ethnomusicologists like Leydi and Carpitella his extensive field research represented a foundational moment for later efforts by Italian scholars to document, preserve, foster and promote popular culture. Carpitella, who also accompanied Lomax for much of the journey, argues that not only the scope of the project but also the timing – on the cusp of modernisation and social shifts that would in turn alter the practice of oral traditions – made it of great value to later ethnomusicological work: ‘Many of the regions that were barely explored at that time have never been re-examined’ (Carpitalla Reference Carpitella1974). Leydi has emphasised the impact of Lomax's influence on different occasions, arguing that his presence in Italy was ‘il punto di riferimento di tutto il revival’ (‘the point of reference for the whole revival’) and ‘decisiva per lo sviluppo di una ricerca etnomusicologica moderna e culturalmente aperta nel nostro Paese’ (‘decisive for the development of modern and culturally open ethnomusicological research in our country’) (quoted in Bermani Reference Bermani2003, p. 135; Leydi Reference Leydi1991, p. 271 n). From Leydi's perspective, Lomax had helped to demonstrate the existence and significance of Italian oral cultures.
Leydi had met Lomax during the latter's stay in Milan, and their interactions would prove formative for Leydi's focus on oral traditions. He was already immersed in a city that in the postwar years was steeped in the American music, literature and films that had arrived with the fall of Fascism's restrictions on foreign imports (Ferraro Reference Ferraro2015). Paolo Grassi, co-founder of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano with Giorgio Strehler, remembers young people listening to jazz for hours at Milanese clubs in a city that was ‘lieta d'esser libera nel mondo’ (‘happy to be free in the world’) (Grassi Reference Grassi and Pozzi1977, p. 138). Elio Vittorini – after editing the important anthology Americana in 1941 – further introduced Italian audiences to American literature through the journal, Il Politecnico, which published texts in translation from writers like Ernest Hemingway and E.B. White. American cultural imports thus contributed to a sense of renewal in postwar Milan.
While a musicologist might understand jazz and folk traditions as fundamentally different, both genres represented, for Leydi and others, a vision of an ‘other’ America, an alternative understanding of who can produce culture and how. In a 1974 interview, Leydi explained that for leftist intellectuals the culture of marginalised Americans differed from the vision of the USA dominant in the ‘Americanised’ Italy of the 1950s. Their focus on those excluded from the fabled riches of US society – as he says, ‘the America of negroes, of poor southerners, of the cowboys of the West’ – was ‘the desperate search for a homeland [patria] by a generation without one’, a ‘homeland of the people’ [patria popolare].Footnote 3 The postwar years had witnessed the repeated frustration of hopes on the left for a meaningful change and a clear-cut rejection of Fascism and its legacy, both political and cultural. In the midst of these disappointments, the mythic figures of working-class and black Americans, the very people recorded by Lomax, seemed to offer a new conception of society, one charged with popular protest. In this understanding, folk and jazz music both become musica popolare, or music of the people, a genre that enveloped Italian oral traditions as well. Dei has attributed the grouping of such diverse styles as Italian tammurriate and American jazz into one, politically charged category to a particular reading of Gramsci's cultural theories (Dei Reference Dei2002, p. 9). These theories include Gramsci's interpretation of folklore as a ‘conception of the world and life’ in opposition to ‘“official” conceptions of the world’.Footnote 4 In the postwar understanding of this definition, diverse styles of music, produced by subaltern groups, seem to offer an antagonistic alternative to bourgeois or ‘mass’ culture.Footnote 5 Later in his career, American popular styles would present Leydi with an intellectual path to Italian ones: ‘[H]o incominciato a rendermi conto che questa patria americana era un mito, un'astrazione, e che era possibile trovarla qui‘. (‘I realized that this American homeland was a myth, an abstraction, and that it was possible to find it here [in Italy]’) (quoted in Bermani Reference Bermani2003, pp. 122–4).
Leydi's own omnivorous interest in the culture of marginalised Americans manifested itself in various projects for print, radio and television during the 1950s: essays on westerns and comics, the organising of concerts by groups specialising in folk and jazz, and television and radio programmes on jazz. Shortly after meeting Lomax, Leydi published a collection of American protest songs, Ascolta, Mr. Bilbo! (Kezich Reference Kezich and Leydi1954), named for a 1946 song directed at Theodore Bilbo, the Mississippi senator and governor whose defence of segregation and the Ku Klux Klan made him a symbol of white supremacy in the American south. The materials included in the volume were probably provided by the People's Song Library, an organisation based in New York that Lomax had founded with Pete Seeger (Ferrari Reference Ferrari2014, p. 90). In an interview with Bermani in 1974, Leydi claimed that Ascolta, Mister Bilbo! introduced protest songs to the Italian left: ‘It was the first appearance of the words “protest songs” in Italy. […] I was very surprised and very pleased [with the reception on the left], precisely because with the Stalinisation of the Italian Communist Party, the rejection of this America had become by this point emphatic’.Footnote 6 Soon after the publication of Ascolta, Mister Bilbo!, critics questioned the necessity of looking to American culture when a tradition of political song already existed in Italy. In his review of the book, Alberto Mario Cirese noted the abundance in Italy of ‘canti di carcerati, canti di operai, canti di perseguitati’ (‘prison songs, worker songs, songs of the persecuted’) that deserved better study.Footnote 7 Carpitella, while praising the new perspective on the ‘movimento democratico americano’ (‘American democratic movement’) also pointed out that Italian protest songs had appeared during the Resistance of 1943–5 and in factory strikes.Footnote 8 Nonetheless, this volume probably offered a useful model for the protest songs of the worker and student movements, including many written by NCI members.
Given the prominence of American popular culture in Leydi's development and his central role in the creation of the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano, it follows that the early activities of the NCI would reflect this influence as well. Bermani notes that Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger's magazine Sing Out! inspired the printing style of the first issue of the NCI (Bermani Reference Bermani1978, p. 8). He also highlights the early Americanism of diverse NCI members, all of whom could provide interesting case studies in themselves: Bruno Pianta, who played American folk music; Paolo Ciarchi, devoted to jazz-like improvisation; Riccardo Schwamenthal, a photographer of jazz musicians; Rudi Assuntino, inspired by Elvis to play rock ’n’ roll and by Bob Dylan to play folk; and Bermani himself, a jazz enthusiast and founding member of the Hot Club Novara. In spring 1964, the NCI hosted a series, ‘L'altra Italia’ (‘The Other Italy’) that included an event devoted to the US work of Alan Lomax and his ethnomusicologist father, John Lomax, ‘I Lomax e la scoperta della musica popolare americana’ (‘The Lomaxes and the Discovery of American Folk Music’), organised by Leydi and featuring original Lomax recordings and new performances.Footnote 9 Even after Leydi left the NCI, the arrival of Alessandro Portelli in 1969 ushered in a new phase of collaboration with radical figures of American folk and protest movements, including Barbara Dane.Footnote 10
Lomax's recordings also appeared in the concerts and LPs of the NCI. Leydi and Filippo Crivelli's Bella ciao – the original performance at the Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi in 1964, the performances that followed, and the 1965 LP – opened and closed with ‘La lizza delle Apuane’ (‘The Challenge of the Apuans’) a song of the marble quarry workers at Carrara that Lomax had recorded in December 1954. This song was the only field recording featured in the performance. Despite Leydi's relationship with Lomax and his presumed knowledge of the source, Lomax was not credited, a fact which Lomax lamented to Carpitella (Plastino Reference Plastino, Lomax and Plastino2008, p. 118n). In 1966, Dario Fo's fantastical interpretation of folk culture, Ci ragiono e canto (I Think and I Sing), relied on various Lomax and Carpitella recordings, although only two lullabies were eventually included on the subsequent LP. The album cites Lomax and Carpitella as the source of these two songs, although the versions included on the disc are not their original recordings but rather new performances. This repeated usage suggests that the Lomax's field recordings provided the NCI with a valuable resource to access and to reproduce oral traditions, yet Leydi's failure to cite Lomax might also attest to some reluctance to acknowledge the American's contribution, especially in the more militant context of the 1960s.
Indeed, Leydi's use of American models to inform his own approach to Italian folk culture represents one of the fundamental differences between him and NCI co-founder Gianni Bosio, a reminder of the other factors in the NCI's inception and a foreshadowing of the bitter rift in 1966 that led to Leydi's departure from the group. In the 1974 interview with Bermani, Leydi posits that Bosio could neither understand nor appreciate the atmosphere of Milan in the immediate postwar period, which was based in part on ‘la componente americana’ (‘the American component’). He attributes this incomprehension to Bosio's militant, rural background, ‘un suo snobismo politico-paesano’ (‘his rural-political snobbishness’), which clashed with Leydi's own ‘snobismo urbano “Quarantacinque-bohème-esistenzialistico”‘ (‘urban “1945-bohemian-existentialist” snobbishness’) (Bermani Reference Bermani2003, pp. 122–8). Indeed, Bosio expresses profound doubts about Leydi's search for a ‘patria popolare’ in American culture. In a 1969 meeting, he located the source of the NCI's flaws in the Americanist bent of its inception: ‘Il Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano è nato sulla idea astratta, utopica, letteraria, di ricreare un nuovo jazz con la musica popolare in Italia. A mio parere, questa non solo è un'idea utopica ma è assolutamente sbagliata, reazionaria, mercificatrice’ (‘The Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano was born from the abstract, utopian, literary idea to recreate a new jazz with folk music in Italy. In my opinion, this is not just a utopian idea but one that is absolutely incorrect, reactionary, commercializing’) (quoted in Bermani Reference Bermani2002, p. 19). With the mention of ‘un nuovo jazz’, he clearly references Leydi's idea of searching for the equivalent of American popular culture in Italy. Indeed, Bosio deems this project intrinsically conservative and prone to commercial exploitation. His critique of Leydi's Americanism suggests the limits of the influence of American folk culture in the workings of the group. Just as there existed Italian political songs before Ascolta, Mister Bilbo!, so too could there exist a militant approach to oral traditions independent of American models.
Giovanna Marini's talking American blues
Giovanna Marini's Reference Marini1966 album, Vi parlo dell'America, her first release of original material, expresses passion like Leydi's for American folk traditions within a militant critique of US social and political power. Her experiences performing at the Folkstudio in Rome and living for two years in Cambridge, Massachusetts fostered her understanding of and proficiency in performing American folk music, as well as her growing disillusionment with the American state and civil society. The scathing evaluation of the USA in Vi parlo dell'America is the fruit of this exchange, as she uses American folk styles to drive home her cultural analysis. For my examination of how Marini translated her experiences into this ballad, I rely on interviews with her, including my own from October 2015 and November 2016; biographical information provided by Ignazio Macchiarella (Reference Macchiarella2005) and Cesare Bermani (Reference Bermani1997); and unpublished letters and documents from the archive of the NCI, housed at the Istituto Ernesto de Martino (Sesto Fiorentino).
Besides this early album, Marini has enjoyed a prolific career, beginning with the classical training that informed her interpretation and performance of oral traditions. She received a diploma from the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in 1961, and she further studied medieval music at the Accademia Chigiana di Siena. This formation shaped her methodological approach to folk culture – including how she negotiated written musical notation to represent oral traditions – and positioned her as a trained musical authority within the NCI. Since these beginnings, she has performed extensively as an individual and in a quartet, released many albums of traditional and original songs, conducted significant research into folk culture in southern Italy, and helped found a music school in the Testaccio neighbourhood in Rome. She has collaborated with other Italian performers, including Francesco De Gregori, with whom she released her most commercially successful album in 2002, Il fischio del vapore, certified platinum within Italy.
As the atmosphere of postwar Milan had fostered in Leydi his passion for cinema and jazz, the cultural scene of Rome drew Marini into the parallel worlds of American and Italian popular music. She was an early frequenter of Folkstudio, a locale founded by Harold Bradley and Giancarlo Cesaroni in 1959. Bradley – a former professional American football player (for the Cleveland Browns and the Philadelphia Eagles), a gospel singer, and a painter – acted as a kind of ambassador for American folk music in Italy. After completing a master's degree in art in Perugia, he fell in love with Rome and in 1959 set up a studio and performance space in Trastevere. Interestingly, he claims that he began performing only after arriving in Italy: ‘I started singing because I was hearing all this folk music from the States. I would be up all night listening to this American music on Italian radio stations and it was very inspiring’ (Piascik Reference Piascik2009, p. 185). His words offer an inverse complement to the trajectory of the Italian artists and intellectuals discussed in this article: being in a foreign place prompted his reclamation of a black American musical tradition.
Bradley soon transformed his apartment into a gathering place for artists and folk musicians, and, with the help of Cesaroni, eventually designated the locale a ‘non-political private cultural club’ (Carrera Reference Carrera, Sheehy and Swiss2009, p. 88). Indeed, Bradley maintained that the material should not be controversial and was even known to interrupt, with a spiritual, performances in which he perceived ‘una sfumatura rossa’ (‘a shade of red’) (Salvatori Reference Salvatori1981, p. 17). The venue blossomed into a very popular destination for folk music – drawing comparisons with the coffee houses in Greenwich Village – and it became an important centre of activity for performers from diverse backgrounds. Bob Dylan's performance there in January 1963 while on a brief visit to Rome would become legendary, with many people swearing in retrospect to have witnessed him perform. Cesaroni, who was there, remembers no more than 15 people in the audience, seated mostly at the bar (Carrera Reference Carrera, Sheehy and Swiss2009, p. 88).
Folkstudio served as the locus for the meeting between Marini, Leydi and Pete Seeger in 1963. While touring Italy, Seeger had heard about the venue and decided to hold a press conference there, and Leydi summoned Marini to translate, as she had spent a year in England as a child. In our fall 2015 interview, Marini remembered this night as her true introduction to both Italian and American popular music:
Ho scoperto tutto a un tratto il canto popolare quando è venuto Roberto Leydi perché era arrivato Pete Seeger a Roma. Io ero l'unica che parlasse inglese, allora ho tradotto Pete Seeger ad un concerto che lui ha dato […] E quando sono andata a Boston abbiamo cantato insieme, è stato molto bello. Sì, è stato molto gentile.Footnote 11
I discovered folk songs all at once when Roberto Leydi and Pete Seeger arrived in Rome. I was the only one who spoke English, so Leydi asked me to translate for Pete Seeger at a concert that he gave in Rome. […] And when I went to Boston, we sang together, and it was wonderful.
This evening also precipitated Leydi's suggestion to Marini that she join the NCI, a consequence that probably contributed to her sense of having discovered both Italian and American folk music in one evening through Leydi and Seeger. Her narrative of Leydi and Seeger's appearance in her life, ushering in her passion for diverse forms of popular culture, signals the catalytic importance both had in her career.
In 1964, Marini accompanied her husband, who had been hired as a physicist at MIT, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she lived until 1966. She would later credit her time in the USA as a period of exploration of popular culture. As she tells Alessandro Portelli in a 2012 interview, her experiences with the NCI sparked an interest that she developed once she was in the States – ‘La cosa strana è che l'America mi ha fatto scoprire le cose italiane’ (‘The strange thing is that America helped me discover Italian traditions’) – a narrative of discovery of Italian popular traditions only while abroad in the USA, Harold Bradley's trajectory in reverse.Footnote 12
Marini arrived in the USA at a time of heightened social tension, and her interviews and letters suggest that she and her husband soon became involved in Boston's political scene. She remembers the mourning for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, the civil rights movement and the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam: ‘Una volta arrivata là poi abbiamo cominciato a partecipare – lui andava all'università e io andavo alle manifestazioni del Vietnam’ (‘As soon as we arrived we started participating – my husband went to the university and I went to Vietnam protests’) (Macchiarella Reference Macchiarella2005, p. 51). She frequented a group of progressive intellectuals, both American and European. She also remembers tracking down Pete Seeger at Club 47 in Boston, where she met his sister Peggy and her husband, the British folksinger and activist Ewan MacColl. These latter two – both engaged in study and theorisation of oral traditions – contributed to Marini's knowledge of ballads. Also at Club 47, she heard Almeda Riddle, an Arkansas folk singer born in 1898 who had been recorded by Lomax: ‘Era la prima volta che sentivo una autentica’ (‘It was the first time I heard someone authentic’) (Marini Reference Marini and Portelli2012). She purchased records, including LPs of Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly. She further developed contacts with prominent figures of the American folk movement, writing in a February 1965 letter of meetings with Seeger, Joan Baez and Irwin Silber – the co-founder and editor of the journal Sing Out! and organiser of the Newport Folk Festival – who even proposed that they organise an appearance of the NCI at the festival in 1966, an opportunity that never materialised.Footnote 13
Marini also performed popular material on her own, with varying responses from her American public. A March 1965 letter mentions singing ‘all'Unicorn’, probably a reference to the Unicorn Coffee House located in Boston's Back Bay that was host to an array of folk and blues performers during the 1960s.Footnote 14 She describes a concert for an American audience: ‘Ho provato a cantare, e canto ancora in un locale, a volte ho grande successo, a volte mi accolgono malissimo, a seconda di quello che canto. Qui tutti hanno il terrore di una sola cosa: il comunismo’ (‘I tried to sing, and I still sing in a venue. Sometimes I have success, and sometimes I am received terribly, depending on what I sing. Here everyone is terrified of one thing only: communism’).Footnote 15 Whether she performed American songs, Italian songs or a variety of both remains unclear, but she suggests that even an audience at a folk performance was hostile to overtly communist material. Her ballad reinforces the impression that only certain degrees of political protest were appropriate for an American audience, as it describes a negative response to a song protesting President Lyndon Johnson's role in escalating the Vietnam War:
’Our President Johnson, maybe you don't know, you've lost with this war the faith of your folks’. […] Questa strofa non andava, l'ho cantata una volta sola, perché un conto è cantare ‘Pace, pace!’ in 30.000 … E chi è che non vuole la pace? E Johnson ci fa anche una bella figura! Ma la fede nel presidente, quella no, non la devi toccare, non è previsto, è fuori canale.Footnote 16
’Our President Johnson/maybe you don't know/you've lost with this war/the faith of your folks’ […] This verse did not go over well. I sang it just one time because it's one thing to sing ‘Peace, peace!’ with 30,000 people … Who doesn't want peace? And Johnson even looks good! But the faith in the president, that no, you can't touch that! It's unexpected, it's out of line.
This moment together with the account in her letter suggests Marini found hostility not just to communist songs but also to any song perceived as too radical, too critical of the government, too fuori canale. Nonetheless, and despite the occasional antagonistic audience, her relationships with people like Silber and the Seegers, as well as her own personal experiences singing in American locales, fostered the development of her interest in popular music and influenced her own style of performing.
Marini's connections with the folk revival scene in Boston may have proved fruitful, but she soon became disillusioned with American society and its protest culture. Her letters to other members of the NCI recount her disappointment with activism around Boston. In a March 1965 letter, she describes the intersection of civil rights, anti-Lyndon Johnson, and anti-Vietnam war protests: ‘Grandi cortei dignitosi e silenziosi, ma ho tanto la sensazione che all'americano in genere basti sentirsi la coscienza a posto avendo fatto un corteo o due e poi si ritira nella sua beata stupidità e del resto se ne frega’ (‘Great dignified and silent processions, but I very much feel that the average American feels his conscience is clear after participating in a procession or two, and then he retreats into his blessed stupidity and doesn't care about the rest’).Footnote 17 She also mentions that she and her husband – who had signed several petitions against Johnson – had been summoned to the Italian consulate, where they were told they had ‘il visto di sospetto’ (‘suspect visas’) and were discouraged from attending further demonstrations. While they may have withdrawn temporarily, her letters from November 1965 recounted further protests in Cambridge, where the police presence was growing increasingly threatening: ‘Vi penso particolarmente oggi, giorno di marce, la nostra qui ad Harvard Square, è stata interrotta dalla polizia […] Insomma stanno diventando particolarmente feroci per quanto riguarda i contrari alla guerra in Vietnam’ (‘I'm thinking about you today in particular, a day of marches, ours here in Harvard Square was interrupted by the police. […] Anyway, they are getting particularly ferocious towards the people against the war in Vietnam’).Footnote 18 The frustrated protests of her letters and her criticism of an alienated and apathetic ‘average americano’ reappear with vehemence in Vi parlo dell'America. Taken collectively, these letters convey Marini's growing disappointment with American systems and their general public.
In 1966, Marini returned permanently to Italy and began writing Vi parlo dell'America, which in our 2015 interview she referred to as ‘il mio ricordo dell'America’ (‘my souvenir from America’). As she tells her biographer, she conceived the album as a kind of report on her experiences, one that would satisfy friends eager for a first-hand account of what the USA was really like:
Tornai dall'America. Tutti mi chiedevano come fosse quest'America. Me l'avevano chiesto anche prima, quando stavo lì. E allora ho deciso di fare un disco di talking blues inframezzato da melodie compiute: qualcuna era americana e l'avevo imparata lì; le altre erano da me inventate. Vi parlo dell'America è stata la mia prima ballata. Il modello a cui mi sono ispirata era certamente Lead Belly di cui conoscevo i dischi. Avevo anche ascoltato diversi bluesman e vari artisti popolari americani. E poi c'era l'influenza di Pete Seeger e degli altri cantanti folk che andavano per la maggiore già allora. (Macchiarella Reference Macchiarella2005, 56)
I returned from America. Everyone asked me how this America was, and they had asked me before, when I was still there. And so I decided to make an album of talking blues interspersed with complete melodies. Some were American and I learned them there, and others I invented myself. Vi parlo dell'America was my first ballad. The model that inspired me most was certainly Lead Belly, whose albums I knew. I had also listened to various bluesmen and American popular artists. And then there was the influence of Pete Seeger and American folk singers who were fashionable even then.
This album merits close attention. As Marini's first published exercise in songwriting, it holds a seminal place in her career. Archival documentation of sales suggest that, alongside original albums by Ivan Della Mea and Paolo Pietrangeli, it was one of the more popular solo albums released by the NCI's record label, the Dischi del Sole, outperforming her 1967 anti-clerical ballad Chiesa chiesa.Footnote 19 It allows us to observe how the concerns of her letters translated into sweeping criticism of US society and the capitalist system. This album is the product of movement and exchange, from the folk styles learned abroad that Marini incorporates into the ballad to the role of her Boston experience in the message she delivers. Most of all, it captures how a leftist Italian artist could negotiate diverse American influences in the context of the mid-1960s, absorbing musical traditions in order to reject American society.
Although nominally divided into different parts, the record is essentially a 30 minute, almost through-composed ballad. Accompanying herself on the Roman mandola, Marini alternates between sung choruses with simple melodies and spoken verses with complex, shifting metres, never pausing except for a breath. These verses imitate the rhythmic speech and shifting melodies of a distinctly American style, the talking blues. Indeed, Marini cites Lead Belly as her main stylistic inspiration. Marini's use of this style reflects the profound influence of American folk performers – especially Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, in addition to Lead Belly – on her own performance style. She even incorporates fragments of two protest songs in English – ‘I don't want to be a Freedom Rider’, which she says she learned from a black friend named Woody, and the previously mentioned ‘Our President Johnson’, which she presumably wrote herself – singing them first in English and then providing a translation for her audience. She also put a particularly Italian stamp on the ballad. In the interview with Macchiarella she asserts her place in the singing–storytelling tradition of Italian balladeers (cantastorie) and says she imitated the raw vibrato of former rice-worker (mondina) and NCI performer Giovanna Daffini in her delivery of the choruses (Macchiarella Reference Macchiarella2005, p. 56). She tears through these diverse influences using seemingly simple elements, her voice and her Roman mandola.
Her valorisation of the talking blues and American folk traditions makes her outsider's scathing critique of American culture all the more striking. She gives a breathless and thorough account of her experience in the USA, and her emphatic yet satirical delivery, this too characteristic of the talking blues, lends a playful tone to her verses. This playfulness colours her evisceration of what she perceives as the numbing capacity of television and mass culture, racism, classism, the hypocrisy of leftist intellectuals and organised religion. As an Italian who has personally experienced the USA, she positions herself as a privileged informant with a clear-eyed perspective on American society. The opening verse immediately establishes her authority and the biting tone of the material to follow:
Boston, America, 1965–1966
Il paese che ci ha dato da mangiare e da dormire per quasi due anni.
Sono tornata qua con una sola idea, molto chiara:
È tutto da combattere, è tutta da distruggere, non c’è niente da salvare.
Boston, America, 1965–1966
The land that gave us food and shelter for almost two years.
I returned here with only one idea, very clear:
It should all be fought, it should all be destroyed, there is nothing to be saved.
Throughout the ballad, she integrates her own personal experiences as an Italian in the USA – protests against the war, noise complaints from neighbours, conformist teachers of her young children, interactions with Italian-American ‘gangsters’ – into her wider examination of American society. She also provides linguistic examples for her Italian audiences, explaining concepts like a ‘date’, ‘bad section’ or bad neighbourhoods, ‘[keeping] up coi Johnses [sic] next door’, ‘privacy’, and even the ‘Unitarian Church’. The use of personal experiences and these vocabulary lessons add to her authority, and they form an introduction to Marini's vision of the layered aspects of American society.
The ballad also criticises American practices of protest, and these verses further reinforce the impression of American militancy, which from a distance seems to provide relevant models of radicalism to an Italian observer, as inadequate. Indeed, she describes the disconnect between the Italian coverage of events – most likely by the leftist press – and the disappointing reality:
Andavamo a dimostrare per le strade più o meno in venticinque, poi arrivavano i giornali dall'Italia: Grande protesta per le vie americane, la nuova sinistra! Venticinque eravamo e davamo fastidio. Quelli a spasso in trentamila è gente incanalata nel grande sistema americano: Country of freedom!
More or less twenty-five of us went to the streets to protest, and then came the newspapers from Italy: Great protest in the American streets, the new left! There were twenty-five of us and we were annoying. The 30,000 people walking by were people channelled into the great American system: Country of freedom!
Whatever protest they manage to stir up is overwhelmed by the indifference of the general public. She continues to recount being censured by the police for the verse that criticised President Johnson, returning to a recurring theme that in the USA behaviours perceived as out of line – from too-radical protest to singing at the wrong time at night – will be repressed. This moment of the song embodies the frustrations she expressed in prose in her letters: what she perceives as the determined apathy of the average American and the insistent conformity of American society. Her tale of frustrated activism leads her into a narration of American race relations, which she perceives as a conflict between poor blacks and whites in their struggle to advance in a capitalist society. Neither group exemplifies ‘another America’ as they might have a decade prior, marginalised within the States but a relevant cultural or political model for Italians, but rather victims and perpetrators caught within a vicious system.
Even after she had permanently returned to Italy, Marini would cite protest culture in the USA as the epitome of the commercialisation of political activism. In 1969, she was invited to participate in Controfestival, an event organised by Dario Fo and Franca Rame and sponsored by the PCI. By organising their event concurrently with the annual Sanremo Festival of mainstream Italian song, Fo and Rame intended to break working-class attention away from what they perceived as a superficial and bourgeois cultural production. Marini, despite her friendship with Fo, refused to participate in the festival, writing an open letter to Paese Sera with the full support of the NCI. She cites her time in the USA as helping her arrive at this decision: ‘Ho troppo bene in mente l'esperienza vissuta negli USA dove la contestazione veniva abilmente inserita in un canale “made for contestation” perdendo tutta la sua capacità di nuocere al sistema’ (‘I very much have in mind my experience in the USA where protest was easily inserted into a “made for contestation” channel, losing all of its capacity to damage the system’).Footnote 20 While she believes in the ‘buona fede’ (‘good faith’) of the organisers, she maintains that such a protest will only contribute to the ‘grosso giro turistico-economico’ (‘big touristic-economic tour’) of the original festival and add ‘un motivo in più di attrazione a San Remo’ (‘one more element of attraction of Sanremo’).Footnote 21 Her reference to her American experience – and the implied knowledge this experience gave her about the corruption of political practice – legitimises her refusal to participate and further emphasises the symbolic potential of the USA.
Indeed, much of Marini's critique of mass culture and working-class alienation can be extended to Italy in the 1960s as well, aligning the album with other popular songs of the early folk revival. This is most of all true of her closing condemnation of the capitalist system, titled ‘Se avessi cento figli (O padrone non lo fare)’ (‘If I had a hundred sons (O don't be a boss)’). Here she abandons the talking blues and embraces the emerging Italian genre of the canto sociale (‘protest song’) to perform the only example of a self-contained song in the entire ballad. Her tone accordingly shifts from playful satire to full-throated anger, as she declares that America is a ‘grande malattia’ (‘great sickness’) that extends beyond its political borders and envelops Italy. Here she targets classic canto sociale antagonists, the boss and the scab, resonating with labour songs of the same period like Ivan Della Mea's 1965 union anthem ‘Cara moglie’ (‘Dear wife’). This last section is easily adaptable to choral participation, and indeed, the album version includes a live recording of the audience singing along at the 1965 Folk Festival in Turin. In this way, Marini's speaking about America becomes her speaking about capitalism at large. Her time in the USA proves fundamental for the development of this analysis, and her ballad, by moving between autobiography and critique, creates a narrative of political formation. The lasting impression is that she has symbolically moved beyond her American influences, asserting her place within a distinctly Italian protest tradition.
Conclusion
In recent interviews, Marini emphasises the positive impact of American folk on her early professional and personal development, and her multi-faceted career – researcher, teacher and performer – has long transcended these early influences and her first album. Like Leydi, she links her introduction to this music closely with the growth of her interest in Italian popular culture, a passion that would dominate her career. If a listener had never heard Vi parlo dell'America, she might imagine that the album contained a sympathetic celebration of American folk culture for an Italian audience, when, of course, it is quite the opposite. When I asked in our interview about her use of American styles to deliver her critique of capitalism, she replied: ‘Certo. Li uso completamente. Uso le canzoni americane. È vero, sono molto contraddittoria. Quello che vale, vale. Vale sempre. Dall'America io ero spaventata. Ero molto spaventata, ma mi piaceva molto’ (‘Of course. I use them completely. I use American songs. It's true, I'm very contradictory, but what is worthwhile is worthwhile, always. I was frightened by America. I was very frightened, but I liked it very much’).Footnote 22 The dual-sided nature of Marini's relationship with the USA is important to consider. It provides material, inspiration and influence, but it also represents the most advanced form of a destructive capitalist system and its state-sanctioned violence. All of these meanings of America are built on cultural exchange: Marini's time in the USA equipped her with the experience and the skills to perform her scathing criticism using methods of American folk. They are also specific to Marini's political moment: by 1967, American models could not be embraced by a leftist artist without significant critique.
Although the lyrics of Vi parlo dell'America reject American models of militancy and resistance, its music suggests that the productive possibilities still exist. Indeed, as the Vietnam War escalated and the process of separating American culture from the actions of the state seemed untenable, American music continued to offer radical models for the Italian folk revival and the Italian left at large, even after Vi parlo dell'America. In 1969, the Dischi del Sole released Alessandro Portelli's first exercise in oral history and field recording, L'America della contestazione, a long-playing compilation of recordings of minister Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, Harlem teacher and performer Mable Hillery, and folk singer Barbara Dane. The album was accompanied by a book anthology of Black Power songs, Veleno di piombo sul muro (1969). The book effectively updates Leydi's Ascolta, Mr. Bilbo! with new material from a more radical source, suggesting that the Italian left need only look deeper to find useful examples of American protest. It also emphasises the role of race in Italian interest in American folk culture, the implications of which merit a more extensive exploration. As we have seen, from the cosmopolitan appreciation of black jazz in the 1950s to the militant leftist fascination with the songs of the Black Power movement, black American music provided an enduring source of inspiration for the Italian left, as it had for the white scholars and music of the American folk movement (Mullen Reference Mullen2008). For our purposes, Portelli's project – as well as his subsequent explorations of this ‘other’ America – demonstrates that Vi parlo dell'America did not close the conversation over American radicalism but left open the possibility for new models of protest.Footnote 23
Many shifts occurred both in the USA and Italy between the 1950s and the late 1960s, and these shifts affected the role of American influence on the Italian folk revival. Nonetheless, the appeal of American music to many leftist artists persisted into the late 1960s, especially the music popularised by marginalised and radical Americans. In the early postwar period and into the 1950s, the music arriving from overseas seemed to present an alternative cultural vision, one that inspired, for Leydi, the search for an equivalent in Italy. This search was soon complicated, however, by ideological differences among the Italian folk revivalists themselves, as intellectuals like Bosio questioned the value of American models. Into the 1960s, as American capitalism and militarism reached new heights and new social movements began to emerge in the USA and Italy, Giovanna Marini responded to this renewed militant context by skewering American culture. Still, her lived experience in the USA and the musical styles she learned there remained important tools for this critique. Vi parlo dell'America satirises through the talking blues. As Umberto Eco wrote of the Italian left's fascination with American literature, jazz, and myths: ‘È un paradosso, ma è storia’ (‘It's a paradox, but it's history’) (L'Unità, 10 November 2001).
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the warmth and generosity of Giovanna Marini, as well as to the guidance of Antonio Fanelli and Mariamargherita Scotti. This article would not be possible without the archives at the Istituto Ernesto de Martino in Sesto Fiorentino (FI), Italy, and the staff there led by Stefano Arrighetti. Finally, I am grateful for the patient support and feedback of David Forgacs.
