I am half-Italian/Sicilian-American on my father’s side. As such, I feel both a deep part of and an alien to my family’s culture. I’ve never been to Italy, though my heart clenches like a fool in love when I see an Italian landscape. I have taught myself a bit of proper Italian, though the first Italian I learned was the end-vowel-clipping tones of those who came to seek the American dream from the lower calf of Italia’s boot. As such, I have a love/hate relationship with the fake Italian songs so popular in the early 1950s, before rock ‘n’ roll really took hold of America.
Arguably, the greatest practioner of fake Italian songs was one of my great loves, Dino Paul Crocetti, i.e., Dean Martin. Dino’s story reflects my own father’s story in some ways. Like my father, he was born in Ohio (my father from Cleveland, Dean from Steubenville), and part of his family came from the Abruzzo region of Italy. Like my father, he spoke mostly Italian until he was five years old, like my father, he loved to sit in his favorite chair and watch Westerns. And, like my father, a handsome man (I am told I look just like my father, so this compliment may be self-serving).
So here, per voi, this Friday slackday, is a selection of the best fake Italian songs of that Italian-loving era. Per voi, cafones. Va’ fa’ un culo! (Don’t translate that.)
The greatest of fake Italian songs:
Here’s Rosemary Clooney, of Irish descent, telling the story of how Mitch Miller talked her into singing one of the biggest hits of her career, a song which was actually written by the great Armenian-American author William Saroyan and his cousin Ross Bagdasarian (creator of Alvin and the Chipmunks). (Thanks to Rick Saunders for the illuminating information.)
Dino and Rosemary duke it out on this fake Italian song, “Mambo Italiano”.
I was going to include Sergio Franchi’s “Pizza-zza” here – despite the fact that Franchi was native Italian, this song sounds ridiculously fake – but there are no videos for it available. So here instead is the only mildly fake Italian “Buona Sera” by the inimitable Louis Prima.
