ABSTRACT
The figure of the singer-songwriter has been the focus of most discourses on aesthetic values in Italian popular music since the early 1960s, when the genre of the cantautore – the contraction of cantante (singer) and autore (author) – was codified. Subsequently, what I have elsewhere called an ‘ideology of authorship’ ( Tomatis, 2014b ) has shaped the way music communities have made sense of popular music in Italy. The perceived connection between the canzone d’autore – literally ‘author’s song’ (a genre established in the 1970s and which included early cantautori from the 1960s a posteriori) – and literature authenticated the former as the quintessential Italian art song and the cantautori as ‘true poets’. While authorship as a form of authentication is not exclusive to Italian popular music, the canzone d’autore genre and the cantautori have been at the centre of the canon of Italian popular music since the 1960s as a true Italian genre, a culturally consecrated ‘indigenous and (national) popular form of song culture’ (Santoro and Plastino, 2007, p. 386).
