Italian Beggar Songs

The street song of the Puglia province of Italy, a folk tradition going back to the thirteenth century, is an art that might well have disappeared if it had not been perpetuated by Matteo Salvatore. The disciple of a blind old fiddler who taught him the whole repertory when he was only seven years old, Matteo Salvatore made a name for himself from town to town, from to , until he had his first successes in Turin. It was in 1973 that he recorded this eloquent testimony to the expressive power of these refrains, to be sung ‘in a small thin voice, as our ancestors sang them’.