Goodbye, Giovanna Marini, the voice of the popular song

AGI – Giovanna Marini, Italian singer-songwriter, ethnomusical researcher and folklorist, has died at the age of 87. Her diverse activity has made her one of the most important figures in the study, exploration and performance of the Italian pop music tradition, but she is also the author of her own songs and cantatas. Marini was born in Rome into a family of musicians. In 1959 he completed his classical guitar studies at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome and perfected his studies and practice with the greatest classical guitarist alive at the time, the Spaniard Andrès Segovia. At the same time, he devoted himself to studying and practicing ancient string instruments such as the lute.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Marini made personal acquaintances with the most important intellectuals and scholars of the Italian popular tradition, among whom stood out Pier Paolo Pasolini (whose encounter was narrated by Marini himself in a live recording that remains one of the best today). Descriptions of Pasolini’s character and working methods), Italo Calvino (again also the author of lyrics for Cantacronache), Roberto Leydi, Gianni Bosio, Diego Carpitella, Alberto Mario Cirese, Cesare Bermani, Giulio Angioni and Alessandro Portelli.

But it is the discovery of convivial singing, or what is defined as sung oral history, with a definition that probably goes back to Giovanna Marini himself (or even to Alberto Mario Cirese with his Non-canted Oral Traditions), that makes sense of the record the popularization of historical events through the privileged instrument of song of anonymous composition and oral dissemination, still active in Italy in the sixties and in a society that was transforming from a purely rural to an urban-industrial society.