Il Fanciullo del West: Shorty Joe Quartuccio’s Country Western Sound
(October 12, 2011)
A Few Notes on California’s Sicilian American country music history.
His 1910 La Fanciulla del West [7](The Girl of the Golden West), set in the Sacramento Valley during the Gold Rush, mines images of the American frontier and subtle western-tinged sounds to create what the San Francisco Opera in their centennial production dubbed the first Spaghetti Western. Indeed, the history of the opera—involving Enrico Caruso and Arturo Toscanini, Puccini’s family’s emigration history, and David Belasco (the San Francisco Sephardic Jew often misidentified as Italian) who wrote the original play—is ripe for a serious Italian American transnational critique.
Enrico Caruso at The Metropolitan Opera, NYC, La Fanciulla del West
Quartuccio was born in Monreale, Sicily [8] (province of Palermo), in 1924. He emigrated with his parents via New York to Ohio in 1930 and then settled in San Jose in 1936. His family worked as farm laborers and cannery workers—he started picking fruit at age 12 and later worked in various fruit canneries. During World War II he worked as an aircraft mechanic in the Navy and later assisted in the training of astronauts and jet pilots at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field. But it was as an immigrant teenager that he was first taken by what he recently described on the phone to me as “what we called them then, ‘cowboy bands’” (October 10, 2011).
And it wasn’t just any kind of country music, but a West Coast-inflected variety that he connected with. One of his earliest influences was Dude Martin, né Stephen McSwain, the San Francisco Bay Area cowboy singer who created an entire “cowboy” persona. As Martin describes [9], “And though born in California, I spoke with a Texas drawl, or as reasonable facsimile as I could muster.” Indeed, even before World War II, a young Quartuccio started his first country trio, mimicking Dude Martin’s style and sound.
Today his band’s recordings are housed at the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina. Shorty Joe and his music will be honored as a “living legend” at the San Jose Italian American Heritage Foundation [10] on Sunday, October 23, 2011 (see attached PDF), where nephew Anthony Quartuccio [11] (and current assistant opera conductor for the acclaimed San Jose Opera Company) will also be in attendance.
Shorty Joe, 2009
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Country music [21] country western music [22] Italian Americans in California [23] Italian California [24] Italians in California [25] San Jose [26] Shorty Joe [27] Shorty Joe Quartuccio [28] Sicilian Americans [29]