Page 4 - VOLUME1-WORKSONGS

b. Beautiful is your name Nina/always Nina I want to call you/the water you wash yourself with
each morning/by beauty I pray you not to throw it away/for a thorn will grow where you throw
it/this is a perfumed rose/I still have the rose you gave me/I love it more than myself/and carry it
with me wherever I go/I smell the rose and think of you.

c. I’ve come to the part of Messina/and saw my love who…/she was dressed like a queen/she will
be the daughter of a king with her crown/but she doesn’t want a crown/she wants the lover she
loved so much.

Recorded: 3b. at Bivona (Argentento) on February 2, 1969, by Elsa Guggino.
3c. at Bafia (Messina) on December 8, 1972, by Elsa Guggino, Gaetano Pagano and Susi Siino.

d. Among the various subjects found in the songs of the peasants there often emerge protests
against the employer. Many songs also denounce, albeit indirectly, the peasants’ miserable life
conditions.

How will we make ends meet this year/the creditors come and go/if I work I can pay you
back/and little by little I’ll give it back to them/I hope what happened last ear doesn’t happen
again/when you didn’t pay me in summer or in winter/but this year I’ve promised myself/that I’ll
take my money to hell with me.

Recorded at Bivona (Agrigento) on February 12, 1969, by Elsa Guggino.

e. The charcoal-worker who performs this song (of which we have included a fragment that is an
organic entity) put a great deal of effort into recalling the following verse. The various couplets,
with slight variations, also exist autonomously as motifs that also recur in other peasant songs.

On this street there is a girl/and in the neighborhood nobody is better than she/(twice)/it’s she I
want, she I must marry/she is inscribed in my heart/along this street I pass and pass again/in the
neighborhood nobody is better than she/(twice)/it’s she I want, she I must marry/she is inscribed
in my heart/my beauty you’re not even twenty years old/time passes and I’m dying for you.

Recorded at Bivona (Agrigento), on February 12, 1969, by Elsa Guggino.

f. This is one of those songs which are performed by groups during the certain tasks (i.e. olive
gathering) and which are also frequently repeated during non-working situations, when their
function is then purely a social one.

The sun rises and melts the frost/I melt for a lovely girl/who is lovely/who is lovely, who is
lovely/who has a breast like a shelf/and eyes like a magnet/I’d like to close her in my hands/I’ll
tell you what/give me a kiss/(repeated)/I’m a dead man and you give me life/(repeated)/my
beauty, I’ll tell you what/let’s run away/and we’ll take what God gives us/with you /with four
good friends we’ve nothing to lose/we’ll calm both mother and father.

Recorded at S. Lucia del Mela (Messina) , on December 8, 1972, by Elsa Guggino, Gaetano
Pagano and Susi Siino.

4. STREET CALLS a-b

Merchandise was and is still proclaimed loudly by itinerant peddlers along the streets and in the
market places, with shouts that in some cases actually assume the characteristics of a proper song.

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