Tammurriata

Tammurriata centres on the tammorra, a large frame drum perhaps fifty centimetres across, with metal jingles around the rim and a deep skin-head played by a complex wrist technique. Singers — often male-female pairs in alternating verses — deliver Neapolitan-dialect lyrics in expressive, vibrato-rich vocal style over the drumming. Multiple drummers improvise interlocking patterns, and the rhythm is loud, physical and danceable. Subject matter ranges from courtship to social satire to outright lament.

Tammurriata is the folk music of the Campania region around Naples and is documented since at least the sixteenth century, tied to harvest festivals, religious processions and the celebrations of the Madonna dell'Arco. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it stayed firmly in the peasant-popular register. The 1974 song Tammurriata Nera, performed by Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare from a wartime original, treats children born of Italian women and African-American soldiers in 1944-45 Naples and pulled the form into mainstream Italian consciousness.

Listen for how the multiple drummers do not all play the same pattern — each adds variations that fit around the others. The vocal style sits high and forward, and the alternating verses are an improvisational contest as much as a duet.

Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare's Tammurriata Nera (1974) is the canonical recorded entry. Festival recordings from the Madonna dell'Arco celebration give the ceremonial setting.

The nera (black) in Tammurriata Nera refers to mixed-race children born to Neapolitan mothers and African-American GIs at the end of the Second World War — the song treats their existence as a fact of postwar Naples and refuses sentimentality.