Amore: The Story of Italian American Song

About this book

Amore is Mark Rotellas celebration of the Italian decadethe years after the war and before the Beatles when Frank Sinatra Perry Como Dean Martin and Tony Bennett among others won the hearts of the American public with a smooth stylish classy brand of pop. In Rotellas vivid telling the stories behind forty Italian American classics (from O Sole Mio Night and Day and Mack the Knife to Volare and I Wonder Why) show how a glorious musical tradition became the sound track of postwar America and the expression of a sense of style that we still cherish. Rotella follows the music from the opera houses and piazzas of southern Italy to the barrooms of the Bronx and Hoboken to the Copacabana the Paramount Theatre and the Vegas Strip. He shows us the hardworking musicians whose voices were to become ubiquitous on jukeboxes and the radio and who