by Lee Gutkind
MARIA LAURINO is the author of Were You Always an Italian?: Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America. A former chief speechwriter to New York City Mayor David Dinkins and staff writer at the Village Voice, she has written for numerous anthologies and publications, including the New York Times, the Nation, and Salon.
My Father’s Music
. . . . . . .
NED BALBO
On April Fool’s Day, 1961, the dissonance of dueling accordions filled my parents’ Long Island kitchen. Peering down into the viewfinder of an old Brownie box camera, its blinding flash about to burst, my mother, Betty, captured the moment: her husband, Carmine, at ease in slippers and clean gray plumbing uniform, his accordion resting on his knees, swaying to the music while their only child joined in. Not yet two years old, in red shirt and overalls, I clutched a boy’s blue toy accordion like a rabbit by the ears. I can imagine how it sounded, the instrument falling open or closed, releasing its tinny moan no matter what my father played. While leather straps helped him steady and guide twin frames of inlaid wood, my dad’s fingers flashed across the buttons. The date, recorded in Betty’s neat script in gold ink against black paper, would have been a Saturday, but Carmine worked most Saturdays and his clothes look freshly ironed. Already gray at forty-two, he wore the same Clark Gable mustache that, through his life, altered just slightly with the times. Perhaps it was Sunday afternoon, his one day off from work. He often wore his uniform when just relaxing around the house and in early spring wouldn’t have had to mow the yard.
I know exactly what he played. All his life, my father’s repertoire rarely changed, its core a group of songs he’d mastered in his teens or twenties, though in 1970, he added two new songs to his list: Hal David and Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” (the theme from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), which was ubiquitous that year, and Cross and Cory’s standard, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” a city that Dad had briefly toured in 1944 as a G.I. assigned to the U.S.-occupied Philippines. Tony Bennett’s version had sold over three million copies to lodge itself in the nation’s collective consciousness, but in the eight years since its first release in ’62, Carmine hadn’t yet attempted his own rendition. Now, the moment had arrived. By the light of a lamp whose base featured a ceramic panther, he forged on, despite wrong notes, sometimes muttering “Mannagia!,” stopping for the night only when he’d mastered the main verse, the bridge a problem he’d reserve for tomorrow’s practice.
By 1970, Anthony Benedetto, the son of Italian immigrants, had replaced Frank Sinatra as my father’s favorite singer. Crucial to this rise in status had been Carmine’s contrary nature, which bridled at honoring the superstar so many others said was best. “Bah! He used to be good,” my father grumbled in old age as if oblivious to the breadth of Sinatra’s recorded legacy, “but he don’t know when it’s time to quit! He sounds terrible now.” Still, Carmine’s eyes welled up when Sinatra died in ’98, the skinny kid who crooned on radio for Tommy Dorsey’s band now a generation’s icon passing into history. Luckily, Tony Bennett was left, enjoying a new wave of success my father forgave when I informed him Bennett’s own son had engineered it. This Dad appreciated: he liked stories of sons helping out their fathers. Otherwise, he’d find fault with any performer too successful, withholding adulation as if it were a point of pride to be the one soul not so easily won over.
With these exceptions, Carmine’s songs reached back to an earlier generation, like the tradition of the diatonic accordion he owned, an echo of Italy kept alive in the enclaves of immigrant neighborhoods where history and heritage held fast. Photographs of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, during the 1920s, the years my father attended P.S. 23, show Model Ts, vegetable carts (6 lbs. of potatoes for a quarter), trolley cars on cobblestone streets, barrels of refuse, boys in knickers, cigar shops, shoemakers, banks, a girl (blurred) on roller skates. Women push their swaddled babies along in wicker carriages, while men in topcoats and fedoras stare grimly into the camera. The Old World did not let go. Block by block, Italians divided themselves—Siciliano from Napolitano, Abruzzesi from Calabrese—according to the towns or regions their residents had escaped, places of thwarted opportunity or strict conformity regarded now with tenderness and regret.
It was a borough in transition, urban in its main-street bustle but still a place of empty lots, potato fields, and unpaved streets, under construction in a decade when men could always find steady work connecting new housing to the city’s sewer system. And so, at Tenth Avenue and 60th Street in November 1922, fourteen sewer workers stood under a supporting arch—seven with mustached, Italian faces—brandishing picks and shovels, proud of their masonry and labor, the photo’s focal point the Irishman saluting at the center. Carmine’s cousins, my father’s brethren—men who labored in light and darkness—survive in the photos that have become one record of that vanished era.
And, everywhere, there was music. The U.S. had suspended civilian radio during the Great War, but afterward, business took the lead. Financed by Westinghouse, four stations were established, each in a major city, while the broadcasting boom that followed brought 500 more into existence. The turning point was 1922, when New York’s WEAF ran the first radio commercials, and jazz of the pre-swing era found its first mass audience.
By decade’s end, Rudy Vallee, the twentieth century’s first crooner and forerunner of Sinatra, would sing in Italian and other languages through his trademark megaphone, the creative clash of a changing nation embodied in his material. These songs, too, were a source of what would become my father’s music: the popular hits he heard as a kid, broadcast over radio, the romantic vocals and trembling brass that cut through static as he listened. But some of these hits derived directly from traditions older still, from sources updated or disguised, born in the homeland that Carmine knew only from rumor.
In reply to the usual question—“What are you?”—that all kids once asked each other, I’d say, “I’m half Italian and half Polish.” My mother was born Elizabeth Gromatsky, and she never questioned her generation’s ethnic rivalries: for her, anything Polish was best—the substance, no doubt, of conversations conducted with her mother, Stella, in the language that they shared. I would never learn Polish, Betty claimed, because my father was Italian; children could learn a language only if both parents spoke it at home. According to her, it was Carmine’s fault that I grew up monolingual despite a smattering of swear words in both parents’ ancestral tongues.
Still, Betty relented in other ways, acknowledging her husband’s background. She admired his music and would, at times, even request a song if she was working in his vicinity while he practiced. She seldom actually sat and listened, but she enjoyed the trembling chords and calming mood of Carmine’s playing. She’d simmer tomato sauce once a week, applying the wisdom gained in youth from some long-lost Italian neighbor who knew the ways of the Old Country. Proud of her meatballs and bronchiole, she recorded her culinary secrets in a cork-board recipe book from some Pocono Mountains weekend. Was it the weekend my father proposed, or a date important for other reasons? I know only that their engagement had lasted for two years, the wedding delayed because Betty’s mother hesitated to welcome Carmine, biased against his Italian blood by her Polish chauvinism. In the Poconos, did Betty persuade him not to give up too soon? There are some questions sons and daughters shouldn’t ask.
By 1964, we’d moved from Babylon, the village where Gugliemo Marconi had invented radio, transmitting his own voice to ships rounding the Great South Bay. Now we lived in Smithtown, in a colonial house too large for three, my voice echoing in the living room that we would never furnish, the polished hardwood floor a place to roll or slide. Carmine played in the basement or in the den just off the kitchen. I’d repeatedly request “The Woodpecker Song,” my favorite, the tick-tick-tick of the bird’s pecking mimicked by the rhythm, its cheerful tune descending brightly with each chorus. The song was an Andrews Sisters B-side in March 1940, but my father probably
knew it from Glenn Miller’s #1 single, which first charted a month later and held on for seven weeks. Or did Carmine know it from elsewhere? Like other hits of the era, “The Woodpecker Song” was born offshore, in immigrant music and traditions Americanized for radio. In the original Italian lyrics, nary a woodpecker appears. Instead, “Reginella Campagnola”—literally, “Little Country Queen”—offers a girl strolling at sunrise, riding a donkey into town, then returning home with gossip; its refrain praises her eyes, her voice, and the Abruzzo region. Harold Adamson’s English lyrics sacrifice an entire world: the rural villages that immigrants cherished and idealized, the homeland that their children would know only from song or story. My father never mentioned knowing the Italian version. Still, he may have responded to the southern Italian flavor in composer Eldo Di Lazzaro’s melody line. (An author of popular songs, Di Lazzaro grew up in Trivento.)
Slightly truer to its source is “The Butcher Boy”: not the Irish ballad of the same title, but “La luna mezzo o’ mare”: literally, “The Moon Is at the Middle of the Sea.” In the English lyrics credited to Rudy Vallee—I knew the refrain, the only lines Carmine consistently remembered—the title character relies on his profession to prove his fitness as a husband: he’s gotta da lamb-chop, and da pork-chop. But, wait: the baker’s boy has gotta da fruitcake, and a cheesecake, too, the use of dialect reinforcing Italian comic stereotypes. Whom should their intended marry? Unfortunately, she’s fickle, her preference changing with each refrain, the listener left to smile wryly whenever she calls out, “Oh, Ma-Ma!” My father hummed along or sometimes sang a phrase or two—whatever he remembered on a particular day. The song portrayed a world where boys followed their father’s lead, apprentices to the profession that defined their family’s place.
But Carmine heard and understood the Italian version, too, which a wedding band performs in The Godfather’s opening scenes. On hearing the old man whose singing provokes such howls of laughter, my father would only say that the Italian words were “bad.” Here, the daughter leaves the choice of husband to the mother. It’s she who sings each verse, describing each man and his profession: the butcher holds the sausage, the fisherman his fish, the shoemaker his shoe, the gardener his cucumber, no doubt provoking sour looks from the prospective bride. Each alternative Mama offers seems as bad as the one before, with each man’s prop a euphemism for his penis. Beyond bawdy comedy, the folk song offers a reminder: no matter whom the daughter weds, she can’t escape her wifely duties, for, as Mama knows from experience, all men are after the same thing.
Still, romance, not sex, defined my father’s store of songs. This was the age of Tin Pan Alley, when songwriters wrote to formulae but within those boundaries could express themselves with eloquence and range. The love song, then as now, cast its overwhelming shadow across the hit parade and Carmine’s repertoire. “You’re My Everything” debuted in the Broadway revue The Laugh Parade at the Imperial Theater in November 1931. On opening night, Jeanne Aubert equated “winter, summer, spring” with the beloved who was all these and, of course, the essential rhyme. The next year, Russ Columbo’s version rose to #10. A star as popular at the time as Bing Crosby or Rudy Vallee, he died, perhaps accidentally, only three years later when a friend decided to show off an antique pistol. Born Ruggiero Eugenio di Rodolpho Colombo, the Camden, New Jersey, son of immigrants was a hero to his people. Carmine must have heard Russ Columbo, “The Romeo of the Radio Waves,” even though he was only fourteen at the time the star was killed.
At times romantic longing showed up in strange places. Many first discovered “You Belong to My Heart” through Disney’s 1945 film The Three Caballeros, whose protagonists are a Brazilian playboy parrot, Donald Duck, and a singing Mexican red rooster. Written by Mexican composer Augustin Lara, “Solamente Una Vez,” or “Only Once,” depicts exactly the kind of fleeting, brief encounter that reinforced the popular view of the Latin lover. Such men could awaken women to an erotic transformation. They were sensual, vaguely effeminate, yet, for these reasons, to be feared: a Mediterranean stereotype that encompassed Italians, too. But Ray Gilbert’s English title shifts the emphasis instead to the singer’s declaration of undying love: when the protagonist asks his beloved if she recalls “a moment like this,” we know the answer must be yes.
Bing Crosby’s version, backed by the Xavier Cugat Orchestra, reached #3 in 1945. Crosby was no Latin. Still, everyone did Latin songs; it was a genre that bands or singers were expected to explore, either as a change of pace or routine feature of their sound. Some performers of Italian descent deemphasized their roots, broadening their appeal by mixing Tin Pan Alley standards with strong, new songs identified with American urban culture. Thus, Frank Sinatra, the skinny 4-F kid that G.I.s once resented for distracting their sweethearts from the thought of imperiled boyfriends across the sea, filled out into the street-smart swaggerer of middle age, though his material and phrasing remained far subtler than his image.
I’d kneel on the basement rug, playing with Matchbox cars. With a faraway look, Carmine would gaze wistfully toward the ceiling—was he thinking of Betty, whom he’d serenaded with “You Belong to My Heart”? Upstairs, she dusted the house, made dinner, washed our clothes by hand; she labored over the flower beds, trimmed hedges, or paused for a cigarette. But as the bellows swelled and shrank, Carmine saw only the gathering stars, a million guitars strumming somewhere beyond my hearing.
Between songs, my father, too, would smoke, review what songs he knew, then pluck a number from the ether of his whim and memory. With a tilt of his head he’d resume, throw his shoulders into the task, squeezing air into hidden reeds while buttons clicked beneath his touch. He had no sense of measure, changing time signatures in mid-song, tapping one foot arrhythmically more as habit than as guide. Yet whatever song he’d work up remained consistent in itself, a hit transformed into some hummable, humbler approximation. In the Age of Swing, various artists would take their turn at the same song. If it had been a hit before, it might well ride the charts again. Or, if it hadn’t, maybe some twist—a different vocalist or arrangement—would finally summon up the magic, sending it to number one.
But who were my father’s audience? His siblings, wife, and I, and, decades back, Italian neighbors, friends, the G.I.s in his unit. Do any remember his renditions, offered freely with a smile, purely for attention and love of music? Today, in memory, I hear the songs as Carmine played them instead of the recorded tracks he’d meant to emulate. I recall, too, the dynamics, the rush of feeling in his performance where, for us at least, the rewards of art resided.
Accordions started showing up in the nineteenth century. Jesuit missionaries in China were introduced to the lusheng, a type of free-reed mouth organ that they eventually brought to Paris. Thereafter, this ancient “reed pipe” inspired the innovations that led to Europe’s first accordions, harmonicas, and reed-based organs. A reed, composed of metal or cane, vibrates due to air flow, as when a clarinetist blows into the mouthpiece of his horn; an accordion, by contrast, conceals sets of metal reeds through which air is forced by the bellows’ push-pull action. In 1860, as Italy struggled toward unification, the Pope’s French allies brought along their accordions and concertinas. They caught on. Before too long, Italian production was established, and accordions like those we know became familiar. There are many variations in accordion design. During my childhood, Carmine played an organetto, a type of diatonic accordion from central and southern Italy: the due botte version offers two left-hand buttons for playing bass and ten on the right for playing melody.
The diatonic accordion, in any version, has its limits. The piano accordion’s keyboard and use of “stradella” or “free-bass” buttons combine to offer a chromatic range over several octaves. By contrast, the diatonic versions play mostly major keys, in eight-note octaves that preclude all modulation. (Some modified diatonic versions offer limited chromatic options but remain awkward to finger, and, anyway, Dad didn’t own one.) “The Butcher Boy” and “
The Woodpecker Song” are cheerful, major-scale songs; by contrast, Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust,” my father’s professed favorite, shifts into a minor accompaniment at the phrase “lonely night.” But since only G major was possible in my dad’s rendition, half of this “stardust melody” would sound less haunted than blindly hopeful. Unluckily, “As Time Goes By” suffered the same affliction: whatever passions had driven lovers throughout history or today, no listener could deny the glaring absence of F minor.
But my father didn’t have a choice (or “cherce,” he would have said: this dated form of a Brooklyn accent followed him throughout his life). Years before, on Humboldt Street, in his childhood single-family row house, his mother shut off the radio as everyone sat down to make music, command of their instruments uncertain but their enthusiasm strong. Their father, James, worked as a solderer for Worksman’s Cycles of Ozone Park, building the Good Humor Ice Cream tricycles that rattled over New York’s streets. The household he supported wasn’t exactly prosperous but still included the upright piano around which so many families gathered.
Was it music they made, or noise, wrong notes and forgotten bridges common? What were the moments, locked in memory, to which they alone had access, siblings joined by experience, tradition, blood? Margaret, the eldest, could sight read and even played classical music, but at these sessions led most often with hits of the Roaring Twenties: “Side by Side,” “Baby Face,” or “California (Here I Come),” songs that recalled those happier, pre-Depression days. Next-oldest brother Mike would watch as Carmine and Joe joined in, at times trading their diatonic and keyboard accordions back and forth. Their sister Angie (baptized Archangela) witnessed Carmine’s struggles, his broad fingers, accustomed to buttons, flubbing the treacherous black keys. “I can’t get this one, give me the other one,” he’d snap impatiently while Joe, ever the nudge, offered the semblance of support. “Oh, it’s not hard—keep practicing,” he’d goad his older brother, inwardly glad that Carmine’s bass lines were clumsier than his own. The keyboard offered freedom, then, but also a challenge beyond my father: to coordinate melody and bass within a chromatic scale. But as soon as Carmine reclaimed the instrument he’d taught himself “by ear,” he regained good cheer and confidence, if not the rhythm he never had.