Fausto Cannone

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Fausto Cannone (1938–2017) was an Italian singer-songwriter, teacher and poet from Alcamo, Sicily. He was the son of Gaspare Cannone, a literary reviewer and anarchist who had moved to the United States. His mother died when he was young, and he had a difficult adolescence.

In the 1960s, Cannone played guitar and sang with bands in Genoa, where he met Fabrizio De André and Luigi Tenco. He later returned to Sicily to study singing at the Conservatorio Alessandro Scarlatti in Palermo and to study harmony and composition with Eliodoro Sollima. He also taught music in grammar schools for several years.

In the late 1970s he began to focus on popular music. He wrote about 700 works, including ballads, songs and poems inspired by Sicily and its people. He did not enjoy the music business, so he published only a few albums.

Cannone worked closely with the Sicilian poet Ignazio Buttitta and with Rosa Balistreri. He set to music 16 poems and a comedy written by Buttitta about him. He toured Europe with Balistreri for five years as her guitarist and also appeared on the TV program Un’ora per voi with Corrado.

In 2008 he released the album Diario d’amore: musiche per sognare and shared the Pigna d’argento prize at Teatro Politeama in Palermo with Massimo Ranieri. He used his music to promote peace, legality and freedom. In 2017 he released another album, In nome della legalità, telling stories of people who fought the Mafia, such as Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone. He said the songs were meant to teach young people about legality and justice.

Cannone sang in the Sicilian dialect and believed folklore should stay alive in music. He traveled and performed to keep his roots.

He donated more than 200 ethnic instruments from around the world, helping start a museum in Sicily that houses them. He dedicated the museum to his father, Gaspare Cannone.

Earlier in his career he made several 45 rpm records, including Pedrito el Drito, Perfida, Addio Matera and Mi piaceva da morire, which won a prize in Monte Carlo. He also composed other musical works and poems, many in Sicilian dialect.