The Death of Jimmy Roselli

Joey Skee (July 06, 2011)

Family and fans say goodbye to a voice of a generation.

I ventured to Hoboken yesterday to pay my respects to singer Jimmy Roselli who died on June 30th. His funeral mass [2]was held at St. Ann’s Church, which is preparing for its annual festa. Approximately 100 people were in attendance, including family and local residents.

Roselli’s renditions of Neapolitan classics were the soundtrack of a generation of Italian Americans—especially in the northeast—whose lives existed between neighborhood-based, working-class immigrant parents and the consumer-based, Italy-centric “new” Italian-American ethnicity. His fans were familiar with and often knowledgeable of the cadences in turn-of-the century Campanian dialects that flourished here over the course of a century.

He helped fortify the Neapolitan canon in the United States with his recordings of “Anema e Core [3],” “Torna a Surriento [4],” and “O’ Surdate Nnamurato [5],” and “Core ‘ngrato [6].” He was the voice of Neapolitan music for many; director Martin Scorsese understood this all too well when he used “Malafemmena” in the soundtrack of his 1973 Mean Streets [7].

I have to admit I wasn’t always fan. As a teenager, I ran from the over-the-top orchestrations and histrionic emoting that came to identify the Neapolitan sound of nightclub music. “Mama” didn’t bring me to tears and “‘A Tazza‘e Café” wasn’t my idea of dance music.

Over time I have become more ecumenical musically and more appreciative of Roselli in particular. Out of the all the Italian-American singers of his generation he perhaps is alone in being able to sing in Neapolitan, enunciating properly the words in a heartfelt delivery. His use and control of vibrato is at the heart of the emotional impact his singing conveys.

Much has been written about Roselli, from a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal [8] to a New Yorker feature [9](which both focused on the urban legend of Sinatra’s vindictiveness), to a book-length biography [10]. And yet his passing has received scant attention beyond the New Jersey press [11]. Almost a week after his death, neither The New York Times or the Italian-language daily America Oggi have run an obituary, and i-Italy.org has yet to post a single news item.

In 2002, director Paolo Santoni highlighted Roselli in his documentary Neapolitan Heart [12], a refreshing look at the transnational aspects of Neapolitan music. Any passione for Neapolitan music that ignores Jimmy Roselli’s music and legacy does so to its own detriment.