Trallalero

My first mistake was buying a book on blogging.  My second was reading it.  If you have been here before, you might notice a few changes to the sidebar and to the heading, because last night I decided to get a little techie with this thing.  I am the essence of the anti-techie...no that's not correct, the anti-techie is the guy sitting next to me asking why I waste my time on the computer.  No, I am the un-techie.  I love my techie toys, I just can't figure out how to use them.

I have spent all day today reading about the blogosphere, and widgets, and html editing and I still don't understand how the hell this all works, but I'm hoping that Blogger does what it says it does, because I got the idea I wanted to post a video.

For months now, when I've wandered down to the centro storico,  I've been hoping to find a group of Trallaleri who are known to sing in Piazza Luccoli.  Trallalero is the folk music of Genova and always sung in the Genovese dialect.  Actually, Genovese is not a dialect at all, but a language in it's own right according to Ethnologue, and has more relationship to French than Italian.  To me it sounds more like Portuguese or Catalan, all sibilant, but I don't get to hear it often enough to get a real handle on it. Anyway, trallalero was popular among the longshoremen and the stevedores in the early 1900's, but by 1950 was almost extinct as a song form.  Then, by lucky chance, the musicologist Alan Lomax heard it for the first time and began recording the singers.  Somehow, that inspired a resurgence of the music so that now there are even festivals and contests in the city.

Today, if you're really lucky, you'll stumble across a group singing in the caruggi and piazzas of the centro storico.   This is a video of a performance in the Piazza I found on YouTube.   Note, the guy singing through his fingers, he's imitating the chitarra.























Ok, it's not for everyone.  Ollie could stand it for about 30 seconds, but I think it's pretty cool.  We've already established he's got no soul happening.  If you're interested in hearing more, you have a couple of options.  The best is to come to Genova and track them down, or, in the alternative, iTunes has the recordings made by Alan Lomax.