The “Via Asiago 10” collection has been enriched with a unique and not to be missed addition. Now available, on CD, the hitherto unreleased works of Matteo Salvatore, the only master who has evolved out of popular song whilst at once remaining its prisoner. A CD that is a collection of the best songs this singer from Apulia sang on radio, not so frequently perhaps, but where he was allowed to express himself freely, outside the parameters that were habitual in the 60s and 70s. Matteo Salvatore was the king of the oxymoron. During his career he, with a great deal of poetic licence, celebrated all those paradoxes that drive audiences and journalists, fans and enemies crazy, but that are in some way an essence of life. That poetic logic of his, that albeit respectful resentment, was what made him great, despite a life that was, to say the least, adventurous. As of an early age, when he first started strumming a guitar, the use he made of his voice and his vast repertoire of popular songs were characteristics that brought Salvatore close to being a blues man. He had certain tracts, the “approach”, typical of those Afro-American artists, a wonderer and a liar, a ‘nanny’ and helper for a blind master, as if he were some kind of Leadbelly or Blind Lemon Jefferson, set against a steely discipline that characterised the whole of his career. But comparison with the great names of Blues does not end here. Matteo Salvatore was an authentic popular singer, who had learned the songs of his vast repertoire through the oral tradition, as he indeed always said himself. He had learnt them in the places in which they had been born and where they continued to be born. His “talking” style, typical of his genuinely popular art, that is the spoken comments with which he began all his repertoire, give an indisputably personal tone, but remain closely linked to a black style such as that of a Big Joe Williams or a white Woody Guthrie, indeed even that of Bob Dylan, who exploited them first in his folk songs and then when he went over to the electric guitar thirty years later. His songs – given that this Apulian artist did himself do some time in jail - also recall the ‘chain gangs’ of the prisons of the southern States of America, or certain “suckey jumps”, typical of a Robert Pete Johnson, perhaps the most famous of the jailed blues men. For the strong pathos that pervades them, his songs are not just the artistic expression of ancient tradition, but also ethnographic and sociological documents that shed a vivid light on the conditions of life and work of vast sectors of the population of southern Italy. His rawest of themes concerns the world of work, with particular attention to the mezzadraia, a highly primitive system of land rental, in a form in which the existence of the mezzadro or renting peasant was always made arduous. Here too, perhaps not so much by chance, the life and art of this singer from the deep and poor south, comes close to the condition of the black Americans of the southern States of America. Whilst Salvatore was being exploited in the fields of Apulia, in Alabama and Virginia eight million people were the victims of this system. These peasants lived in desperate conditions, working from dawn till dusk; they lived in rickety wooden shacks, without any concession to hygiene, eating pig’s slop and drinking dirty water. Disease wrecked havoc, chiefly pellagra and malaria. In Salvatore’s infancy too there are “riding bosses”, the mounted landowners who menaced the mezzadri and hunted down union representatives in the same way as their predecessors had hunted down fugitive slaves. Matteo Salvatore manages to deal with these themes in a highly accomplished way in “Padrone mio” (My Boss) and “Lu soprastante” (Overlord), which he indeed had the brass face to propose at the Cantagiro! Here too, with a moving and penetrating voice, possessed of a vigorous dramatic strength and a rare expressive plasticity, he manages to have us comprehend all the aspects of the subtle spirit that is at the heart of his genre. Gifted with a varied style, full of imagination and freshness, characterised by original and inspiring effects, over and above the typical expressive means of the folksongs of the south, this Apulian singer uses with remarkable skill the falsetto and the baritone, that way of singing with the mouth half shut and phrases that tremulously fall from the lips, capricious entries, and quarter tones. A true and proper vocal archive, a song writer and singer who almost constitutes a compendium of folk song, documents of vocal art that those who wish to study popular art cannot but investigate, without for this loosing a taste for irony, the double entente, the broad wink, also present in this our selection. In the same way as the blues sang pain and sufferance but also joy and exaltation, so does Matteo Salvatore frequent both aspects. In order to be less dramatic, he often uses a female figure – “Petto tonno” (Round Bosom), “Filomena”, “Brutta cafona” (Poor Peasant Girl) – where the women are vanquished, condemned to an objective state of inferiority. But the aggressive sensibility, rural sensuality, the infidelity suffered also at times make room for the dramatic aspects of the female figure. Such is the case of an extraordinary theme, “La ballata di Teresina” (The Ballad of Teresina). After all, ballad singers have always shown that it is indeed the things that we laugh about in public that make us cry in our intimacy. One asks oneself if the style of Matteo Salvatore was indeed that of ‘popular music’. If one uses the term in its most basic meaning – that is music for one and all – we must indeed say that such a statement is but half true. It may have attracted interest and caused enthusiasm, in the course of its evolution, for a more or less vast audience, but in so far as it is artistic expression it cannot be put at the same level as popular song that has principally aimed at reproduction. The issue of the relationship with popular condition (and ideology) takes us far. In by far the greatest majority of cases this relationship is absolutely immediate; indeed, too immediate and direct for it to be consciously articulated. The social and cultural aspects mentioned are simply a part of the existential background of popular music and the way they affect the definition of expressiveness is neither made clear nor resolved at the level of conscience. The epic of the ballad singer which has as one of its reasons for existence the awareness of the acute economic problem has not been resolved in the course of two centuries of blues and neither by our local folk singers. Listening to this CD, song after song, the personality of this artist emerges, unlucky as you may like, but in the end hard headed, dogged, one who has always done only what he wanted. A legitimate aspiration for an artist who has always wanted to feel free. Perhaps this is why today Matteo Salvatore – like Sergio Endrigo, Bruno Lauzi, Umberto Bindi and others – is so “rediscovered” and “revised”. Festivals, reviews, magazine covers, it is enough for an artist worthy of such definition and who has a good repertoire to leave this valley of tears and the next day all is ready for a the consecration and the business of continuation. Naturally with public money. Operations that leave strong doubts. Artists, above all if inspired and valid, should be helped when alive , not when dead. Doing it after their death merely contributes to the mill of he who ‘rediscovers’. Matteo Salvatore did not die either young or suddenly, he died at the age of eighty and was basically inactive from the age of sixty on. Where were, in that long period, all the revisionists? Why have they only sprung up now? Who benefits from all of this? For sure not everyone has had the good fortune of knowing him and appreciating him when alive – on my part I shall never be able to forget the long evenings at the Folkstudio, when Matteo came back on the scene after his legal problems, or his live appearances on RAI, thanks to Renzo Arbore, who was the one who made it possible for me to get to know this extraordinary and unpredictable artist personally – but doubt on the transparency of certain operations, that often conceal only emptiness, remains in its entirety. We prefer to favour the historic, hitherto never released, top quality, Matteo Salvatore, with unforgettable pieces from “Il concertone”, “Quando la gente canta”, and “Combinazione suono”, on air between the 60s and 80s, flanked or interviewed by Otello Profazio, Renato Marengo, Ludovica Modugno, Gegè Telesforo, and Oreste Lionello, in one of the many attempts at regaining positions lost, not for lack of inspiration, which was luckily never lacking, but rather for a decidedly turbulent style of life. Listening to this highly precious material again, which sees light for the first time, also after so many years, one is moved by the talent on an artist who touches the nerve endings and the heart, a vibrant and sincere man, indeed the symbol of a certain human condition: the most solitary and desperate.