"Bella Ciao"
'Songs Of Resistance 1942 - 2018' (Marc Ribot album), 2018
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As of this writing (March 2022), “Bella Ciao (Goodbye Beautiful)” is Tom’s most recent recording. The cover of an old Italian song came out in 2018 on his longtime guitarist collaborator Marc Ribot’s album Songs of Resistance 1948 – 2018.
The album features guest singers like Steve Earle and Meshell Ndegeocello singing mostly lesser-known (at least in America) protest songs backed by Ribot and his band. “I played Tom a bunch of the tunes and he immediately bonded with that one,” wrote Ribot when it was released. “Of course, he brings a certain gravitas to everything he does—my Italian friends say he sounds exactly like an old ‘partigiano’ (resistance fighter)!”
By fluke coincidence, this is an appropriate week to listen to “Bella Ciao.” Here’s how a Financial Times article on the song’s origins begins:
Every year on April 25, Italians gather around heavily laden tables and barbecues and chant “Bella Ciao” at least half a dozen times, right hand on the heart. It was sung as an anti-fascist resistance song during the second world war and singing it has become part of the annual ritual celebrating Liberation Day, the anniversary of the end of the fascist regime and Nazi occupation in 1945.
The song dates back to the 19th century, though, first sung by female rice paddy field workers in Italy protesting their harsh conditions. Again from the Financial Times, about how a 1800s labor anthem became a 1940s anti-fascist anthem:
The original lyrics describe “insects and mosquitoes”, the boss’s “cane”, the “curved” backs of the mondine [workers], the “torment” of wasting their youth toiling. Its repetitive quadruple meter seems designed to mark the long working hours and make time go faster. As in the wartime adaptation, the words “bella ciao” (“goodbye beautiful”) were sung thrice in the second line of each verse, but the identity of the bella the mondine are waving goodbye to remains unclear. It could be their beautiful youth, their freedom, or even themselves.
In the 1940s, an unknown author adapted the mondine’s song of protest for the Italian resistance movement, telling the story of a young man who leaves his girlfriend to join the partisan militia, and, probably for the last time, says goodbye. This version offers a much darker narrative: “Take me,” the narrator asks the partisan, “because I feel death approaching.”
Though “Bella Ciao” dates back several centuries, Ribot and Waits probably didn’t have rice paddy workers on the brain in 2018. The song and album came out smack in the middle of the Trump administration. In an interview with Westword while he was still working on the album, Ribot explains that recording a bunch of old protest songs was inspired by him out on the front lines of marches.
I’ve been on a number of protests, and what I noticed was that I think we’re faced with a challenge to democracy. And I think that people need to get out and protest and have. But I’ve noticed that when people are marching, they don’t seem to have access to our musical traditions of protest.
I’ve taken certain tunes from the Civil Rights movement and others from the partisan movement in Europe during World War II and then some originals and then a few tunes from other places in the world. For example, there’s a Paquita la del Barrio tune from Mexico. She’s a Mexican romantic ballad singer, but this tune is so raw. It’s called ‘Rata de los Patas” – “Rat With Two Legs.” And I’m telling you, the lyrics are so brutal it makes the Dead Kennedys seem nice by comparison.
Tom has never been a Springsteen or Mellencamp-type activist, giving interviews about the news of the day or endorsing particular candidates. But he’s a protest singer all the same, especially in the 21st century, with explicitly anti-war songs like “Day After Tomorrow,” “Road to Peace,” and “Hell Broke Luce.” So his choice to cover “Bella Ciao” on an album called Songs of Resistance was pointed, even if it didn’t come with a statement condemning Trump’s assaults on civil liberties or the English language. Doubly so for the explicitly anti-Trump music video that accompanied the song, which Tom presumably approved.
Back when his relatively political album Real Gone came out in 2004, Waits told the LA Times a bit about his philosophy of protest music:
“Writing songs about the war is like throwing peanuts at a gorilla,” Waits said by e-mail in response to questions from The Times about two songs from his album “Real Gone,” due Oct. 5, that are the first politically driven songs of his career.
“But then I think, look how important soul music was during the civil rights movement” of the 1960s, Waits says. “Sometimes I feel we are way outnumbered and the dark side has one more spear. But folks in the arts -- it’s their job to put a human face on the war.”