You can also see Francesco Ciabattoni’s entry on De André in The Literary Encyclopedia.
By Marianna Orsi, University of Hawaii at Manoa.
The first-generation, rebel, critic, introverted, educated, anarchic, lover of nature and the sea, regular visitor of the infamous neighborhoods of Genoa as well as of the countryside of Sardinia, and for many the Italian singer-songwriter par excellence.
Fabrizio Cristiano De André was born on February 18, 1940, the son of Giuseppe, a professor and director of various schools, and Luisa Amerio.
Due to the war, the family seeks refuge in a farmhouse in the countryside of Asti. Fabrizio grows up there and begins to develop a great love for the countryside, animals, and the environment.
In 1942, his uncle, Francesco Amerio, is deported to a concentration camp in Mannheim and will return, profoundly scarred psychologically, at the end of the war.
Fabrizio begins to show interest in music and to show intolerance for the rules. In 1944, Professor Giuseppe De André is forced to leave Genoa and to live in hiding due to an arrest warrant for having refused to report the Jewish students at his school.
After the war, the De André family returns to Genoa. Fabrizio begins elementary school, but early on demonstrates an intolerance for discipline as he spends a great deal of time in the streets causing trouble and instigating fights. In 1948, he meets Paolo Villaggio, the son of family friends, and a future author who will become his inseparable partner in adventures.
De André’s parents, passionate about classical music, decide to have him study the violin for which he immediately shows great talent. Soon thereafter, he becomes interested in the guitar through teaching himself, and thanks to the great Colombian teacher Alex Giraldo, in the South American classics.
In 1955, Fabrizio joins a country-western music group, The Crazy Cowboys & The Sheriff One. During this time, he also becomes interested in French music and musicians, such as Edith Piaf, Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel, and Leo Ferré. He is especially fascinated by George Brassens, the human comedy described in his songs, his interest in unsettling episodes, and by the weaknesses and contradictions of the human soul. He also becomes interested in jazz, and at the young age of sixteen joins the music group of the pianist Mario De Sanctis, which was also frequented by another already famous singer-songwriter, Luigi Tenco.
In 1959, he graduates from a classical high school, becomes interested in politics, and joins the Italian Anarchist Federation. He begins to think highly of the destitute anarchists that help those who are poorer than them, and he feels great solidarity with those who live on the outskirts of society, such as prostitutes, gay people, thieves, alcoholics, and with the world of the carruggi, the alleys of Genoa.
In 1960, he begins to write songs, and the first is La ballata di Michè, written with Clelia Petracchi. He performs in theaters with his friend Paolo Villaggio and with Luigi Tenco, both Genoese like him.
In 1961, he enrolls in university to study law, attended also by Villaggio who received good grades.
Between ‘60 and ‘61, the first albums Nuvole Barocche/E fu la notte and La ballata di Miché/La ballata dell’eroe are released.
In 1962, he marries Enrica Rignon, known as Puny, and soon thereafter their son Cristiano is born.
The first performances start; however, in order to maintain his family, De André works in the schools his father once directed, studies law intensely to obtain his law degree, and gives private lessons.
In 1964, La guerra di Piero is released, which is inspired by Brassens and his uncle Francesco’s story. The piece does not gain much recognition at first, but then blows up in 1968 and becomes the symbolic song of the youth protest. Also, he records his version of Joan Baez’s Geordie in 1966 with Maureen Rix.
In 1967 Tenco commits suicide in Sanremo during the music festival. It is a terrible shock for Fabrizio, and in the two following nights he writes Preghiera di Gennaio in memory of his friend.
The summons to appear in court begin as well as the accusations of obscenity and blasphemy in some of his songs.
In 1968, Mina records La canzone di Marinella legitimizing De André as a singer-songwriter (as does Gino Paoli in his song Il cielo in una stanza). In addition, the protest movement crowns him as its representative causing the secret services to spy on him for a few years.
In 1973, he begins a productive collaboration with Francesco De Gregori, and he dedicates himself to translating the lyrics of world-famous artists, such as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. In the meantime, his marriage with Puny (Enrica) is not going well, and in 1974 Fabrizio meets the singer Dori Ghezzi whom he will marry in 1989.
Between 1974 and 1975, he conquers his shyness while performing and embarks on his first tournée. The shows are often introduced by the Genoese comedian Beppe Grillo. Fabrizio performs both in popular clubs, scandalizing the Left, who at the Feste de L’Unità (annual national events organized by the Italian Communist Party) or at those of the Lotta Continua (an extreme-left movement) often also improvises free shows for those who cannot afford to pay for a ticket, arousing the animosity of the music-industry executives.
In the meantime, Fabrizio has achieved his dream of having his own agricultural business. He purchased an estate in Sardinia and dedicates himself to restoring the house and the farm. In 1977, the daughter of Fabrizio and Dori, Luisa Vittoria, called Luvi, is born.
In August of 1979, De André and Ghezzi are kidnapped in their estate in Sardinia by two criminals and remain under the control of their captors until December. They spend the majority of the time tied to a tree and wear the same clothes of the day they were taken hostage. After the ransom is paid, the two are freed. They decline to be a civil party against their kidnappers in court. Their love for Sardinia is not undermined.
In 1981, the album Fabrizio De André is released, famous like L’indiano, for the image of a Native American on the cover. Fabrizio sees similarities between the Native Americans and the Sardinians, considering both of them exploited and enslaved peoples who were expelled from their homelands by careless colonizers. The album contains the songs Hotel Supramonte, dedicated to the kidnapping, and Fiume Sand Creek, inspired by the massacres of the Cheyenne and the Arapho by the army of the United States in 1864.
De André receives numerous awards and recognitions, including one from Club Tenco. He is offered the opportunity to be the opener for Bob Dylan’s concert at San Siro in Milan, but after a long reflection, he declines.
In 1996, Anime salve is released, dedicated to the themes of liberty, solitude, marginalization, and to various figures considered to be “different,” such as transgender people and the Rom. The final song, Smisurata preghiera, is a sort of spiritual testament that is inspired by the saga Maqroll Il Gabbiere by Álvaro Mutis with whom De André becomes friends. The Spanish version of the lyrics is inserted in the soundtrack of the film Llona llega con la lluvia by Sergio Cabrera, which is based on Mutis’s novel.
In 1996, the novel Un destino ridicolo, written with Alessandro Gennari, is also published. In August of 1998, De André is diagnosed with a tumor in his lungs and passes away on January 11, 1999.
REFERENCES:
http://www.fabriziodeandre.it/biografia/
Francesco Ciabattoni, La citazione è sintomo d’amore. Cantautori e memoria letteraria, Rome, Carocci, 2016.
Luigi Viva, Non per un Dio ma nemmeno per gioco. Vita di Fabrizio de André, Milano, Feltrinelli, 2008.
Commentary on “Il suonatore Jones” (Julianne VanWagenen, University of Michigan)
“Il suonatore Jones” (Fiddler Jones) is the most famous song from the Genovese cantautore’s 1971 concept-album Non al denaro non all’amore nè al cielo. The album was inspired by nine epitaphs from an American book of poetry by Edgar Lee Masters called The Spoon River Anthology; the title comes from a line describing Suonatore Jones in the opening song “La collina”:
“The Hill” (Edgar Lee Masters, 1915)
Where is Old Fiddler Jones
Who played with life all his ninety years,
Braving the sleet with bared breast,
Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,
Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven?
“La collina” (Translation, Fernanda Pivano, 1943)
Dov’è quel vecchio suonatore Jones
che giocò con la vita per tutti i novant’anni,
fronteggiando il nevischio a petto nudo,
bevendo, facendo chiasso, non pensando
né a moglie né a parenti,
né al denaro, né all’amore, né al cielo?
“La collina” (By Fabrizio De André, 1971)
Dov’è Jones il suonatore
che fu sorpreso dai suoi novant’anni
e con la vita avrebbe ancora giocato.
Lui che offrì la faccia al vento
la gola al vino e mai un pensiero
non al denaro, non all’amore né al cielo.
Masters’s Spoon River Anthology was the best-selling book of poetry to date in the United States when it was first published in 1915. It is a compilation of 244 free-verse poems, all of which, except the introductory “The Hill”, are epitaphs told from the point of view of citizens of the imaginary village of Spoon River, Illinois, who lie dead and buried in the town cemetery. The book’s success made Masters a sensation nationwide, but since then his name and works, including Spoon River, have largely faded into oblivion in the U.S. In fact, when his face was printed on the U.S. 6-cent stamp in 1970, most Americans could not identify him. Yet, in Italy at that time, his name and work were still well-known and the cantautore, Fabrizio De André, was about to reignite Masters’s popularity with his 1971 album. Francesco Guccini, too, has a song that mentions Masters; his 1974 “Canzone per Piero” in the line “He’s a smart guy, you know, he reads Edgar Lee Masters” [È in gamba, sai, legge Edgar Lee Masters]. The song was the first of its kind be included in the reading list for Italian high school exit exams.
The difference in Masters’ divergent legacies in the U.S. and Italy is largely a result of the very different mythology the figure of Masters and his Spoon River has accrued, which begins with Spoon River’s first translation by the antifascist writer and Americanist, Cesare Pavese, and his student, Fernanda Pivano. The story goes that 26-year-old Pivano, with the help of Pavese, subverted Fascist censors by requesting to publish Antologia di S. River, knowing that ‘S. River’ would be interpreted as an abbreviation of the saintly ‘San River’. The supposed ruse worked and Einaudi managed to get the book past the censors on March 9th, 1943. Pavese and Pivano thus became literary partisans. During the years of the most intense resistance to the Fascist regime, they were subverting the Fascist State and Fascist culture, with pens rather than swords. This story, though widely considered apocryphal, is retold in nearly every new edition, as Spoon River and Italian partisanship have become strictly correlated in the mythology surrounding the book.
When De André released his album in 1971, he included a full-spread interview with Pivano, and in so doing, he linked Pivano’s and Pavese’s original partisanship with his own countercultural stance during the 1970s. He ends the interview thus: “Fernanda Pivano is for everyone an author. For me, she is a 20-year-old girl who begins her professional career by translating a libertarian’s book while Italian society has other tendencies entirely. It happened between 1937 and 1941, when this really meant being courageous,” in a clear reminder of the historical and political stakes.
Fernanda Pivano often remembered how she saw verses of her translation painted on buildings in 1943 and 1944 as a form of youthful subversion of Fascism, while in 1969 Pivano’s translation of the anarchist epitaph, “Carl Hamblin,” was carved on the anarchist-hero Giuseppe Pinelli’s tombstone after his death in relation to police corruption after the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan.
Antologia di Spoon River was considered to represent a revolt against conformity in Italy during WWII, and when De André released his 1971 album, he guaranteed that legacy. Fiddler Jones, remembered in De André’s “Suonatore Jones”, is the hero of the album and acts as a representation of the cantautore himself.
As a musician, Suonatore Jones resolves the inability to communicate, which De André recognizes, as many others before him, as a characteristic of the modern era. In the album’s first epitaph, “Un matto,” the theme of incommunicability is introduced: “You try to have the world in your heart / and be unable to express it in words [….] You too would go looking / for the words certain to make yourself heard” [Tu prova ad avere un mondo nel cuore / E non riesci ad esprimerlo con le parole […] anche tu andresti a cercare / Le parole sicure per farti ascoltare]. That ‘make yourself heard’, which in Italian is farti ascoltare, becomes lasciarti ascoltare when Jones describes why he plays for those who demand it of him: “you like to let yourself be heard” [ti piace lasciarti ascoltare]. Thus he implies that in the modern world musicians exist in a unique position; they do not have to fight to be heard, listened to, understood, but rather they have the pleasure of people seeking them out to listen. Musicians act as a space of communication for a modern community that struggles to find it.
Beyond the role of the musician, Jones represents the potential of the individual to free himself, to “wake up” liberty and to leave the diverse constructs “protected by barbed wire” [protetta da un filo spinato], which have confined other citizens of Spoon River. Jones chooses to leave the field untilled, and ultimately he leaves the field itself, because, as he says: “I saw liberty sleeping / in the cultivated fields” [Libertà l’ho vista dormire / nei campi coltivati]. This, for both Masters (the libertarian) and De André (the anarchist), is symbolic of a desire to create a society that is not controlled by the religious (Puritan for Masters, Catholic for De André) and bourgeois superstructures that confine individuals to act within certain productive parameters with final goals of achieving heaven and gold.
Check out this video of Jovanotti performing “Suonatore Jones” from the cemetery in Illinois where the man who was supposed to have inspired Edgar Lee Masters’ fictional character is buried.
There is also an interesting documentary, Ritorno a Spoon River, that was made in 2015 by the Italian film-maker duo Francesco Conversano and Nene Grignaffini. It was set in central Illinois and commemorates the centennial of the original publication of Spoon River Anthology.