Overheard at Lem's:
Trooper York said...
I paid for it out of my own pocket as people who get married should do.
Weddings are very important in the Italian American culture. It is the one time you put your differences aside and celebrate as a family.
Unlike the Irish who do that for funerals.
My parents had that vinyl LP which is as old as me (1960); it's called
Louis Prima Digs Keely Smith. One of the songs,
Zooma Zooma Baccala, amused me and my brother to no end growing up, but we had
no clue what the song was
really about. It's really the same song in the wedding scene from
The Godfather:
The original lyrics aren't even in Italian; they're in a Sicilian (or Neopolitan) dialect. The wonders of the Internets led me to track down the meaning of the words to the Louis Prima song one night. I was
very amused by what I found. I converted my inherited vinyl to digital and translated the lyrics in the first YouTube link.
The
mezzogiorno polka song tells about a young woman choosing a man to be her husband. She is confused and asks her mother to decide. Her mother describes each man and his "job," giving her the same comical answer for each one, indicating for instance, that if you marry the butcher, he will "sausage" you; if you marry the carpenter, he will "hammer" you; if you marry the farmer, he will "plough" you.
Obviously, the song is one big double entendre. Here's the best translation that I found:
link
In many ways, the 1960's and earlier times were not more innocent times--people just had better imaginations.
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*Originally posted as "Those Horny Italians"
here
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