Oh ndiamone!!
It's nice to hear someone who appreciate italian artists and singers!!!
Well, being ``diamone'' is an Italian name (it's my great-grandfathers, and I've been using it in the music world forever) I suppose it was at least partially in my blood all this time waiting for my uncles to bring back Italian and other radio hits on records for me to love.
Like this one. Georgio Gaber doing
Far Finta di Essere Sani:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9yvGh3qzxc
which is on the same
Successi Grandi dell` Anni 1970 as the others.
Somebody needs to do the same to this as they did to the other and lay the stereo record mix
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xggzm4QqXtc
over the top of the mono RAIDUE lip-sync video and make stereo on Youtube.
Like they need to do for this other song on the sequel
Successi Grandi dell` Anni 1970 II record Nicola de Bari doing
Agnese. (couldn't find the Italian one online, his vocal in Italian has more conviction than the Spanish version):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEb87n6_BSc&playnext=1&list=PL29D9AEE8D5ACDEE0.
It's especially meaningful to me because my grandmother's name was Agnes.
Living as far out of town as she did, once we kids got tired of playing outside, there was little to do in those days to occupy the long days and nights when we used to go up for the summers in the `50's`60's and `70's.
Some years earlier, my granddad was given a real pipe organ, all in pieces, after surviving an abandoned church that had burned to the ground from lightning some two decades earlier, the manual protected as were most of the pipes by its’ brick-walled enclosure. By the time we kids were old enough to appreciate it, those forgotten pieces of organ had by then been laying around the cold, wet basement for the better part of two decades instead of being well-loved and well-worn by generations of worshippers.
So all these parts were just laying around deteriorating year after year, so a few years later, when my granddad came into a little bit of money, going against my grammom who said it was a frivolous waste, he decided, to get the bright idea of drafting an organ historian at the State University Music Department to help him restore it so that it could be rescued from the pile of parts laying for years all forlorn in a corner of the basement and be once again loved by a crowd of people.
So in the corner of the basement where all the organ parts once lay forgotten and rusting, my granddad built a huge fireplace and cozy woodgrain family room and library after the restoration was complete, into which to put the now-gleaming organ.
My grammom, who hadn’t played organ for years, ever since she used to be Church Organist at the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul when she and my granddad were still a struggling young couple, started out playing church hymns and other simple pieces on Saturday afternoons, and found out the neighbors would come from miles around to hear her practice in the basement.
This grew into a weekly Saturday night affair all summer long and became the highlight of the neighborhood for years. When we kids got a little older, she decided some numbers needed a choral accompaniment, and began teaching us all kinds of songs we never heard of before, probably to get us away from the ` cacophony of noise' offered forth on the radio by the likes of The Doors, Janis Joplin or Black Sabbath.
But it was a good way for a kid to occupy himself though in those more innocent and pleasant days.
So by then we had the real pipe organ that my granddad helped restore, we had the people in the form of aunts, cousins and neighbors, now all we needed was the pop and the pizza and we could have opened up a Pipe Organ Pizza (restaurants that featured Gay 90's through Roaring 20's sing-along lyric slides on a projector) 20 years before it became all the rage and `gotten rich overnight'. (LOL)
Today's Idol TV craze can't even hold a searchlight nevermind a candle to the kind of talent we used to get just from your basic average friends and neighbors in the Pipe Organ Pizza places of the 80's and early 90's.
But after years and years of learning and then singing all these old, old songs from my grammom like Some Sunny Day by Irving Berlin popularized by Ethel Merman in the early`30's, Sam the Old Accordion Man by Walter Donaldson popularized in the 20's by Ruth Etting, or Jazz Baby by M.K. Jerome, re-popularized by Carol Channing in the 1967 musical Thoroughly Modern Millie, we turned the tables on her for once, teaching her a song SHE'D never heard before, which subsequently became Her Song for a VERY long time.
In Spanish it's like (shrug) but in Italian you CANNOT sing this all the way through without at LEAST getting the sniffles if not bawling all the way out.
Back then, everytime we were over to my grammom's house, we'd always try and sing it for her, usually after supper when the dishes were done and the food was put up and everybody would go down into the basement, light the fireplace and spend the evening visiting in the nice cozy family room.
But every single time, she would get halfway thru the song on the organ, get to cryin' then that would get US to cryin' tryin' to sing it with her, and then after two or three tries the whole thing would just collapse into a puddle on the floor. We even sang it at her funeral. With the same results as always. (LOL)
Sad to say though, even the live professional singers nowadays never do any better onstage at the concert than we did as kids and teenagers at my grammom's house. In the concert series we do today, we've tried putting it in the show for years, but once them trumpets get to blowin', even the most stalwart masculine guys that can belt out any number of love songs with no problem, dissolves into the same puddle on the floor as we kids used to do by the time we get to the second chorus.
So, everytime we try it in concert, whoever's trying to sing it ends up standing there bawling like a baby thru the rest of the song and is reduced to holding the mic out for the audience to fill in.
By the time it's all over, they're all cryin' too, so we always use it as an Act I finale.
And keep Band Aids and salve onhand for fixing everybody up during Intermission that burnt their fingers trying to keep their cigarette lighters lit thru the song.
