Those Horny Italians!

My parents had a vinyl LP as old as me (1960) called Louis Prima Digs Keely Smith.  One of the songs, Zooma Zooma Baccala, amused me and my brother to no end growing up, but we had no clue what the song was really about. It's really the same song in the wedding scene from The Godfather:



The original lyrics aren't even in Italian; they're in a Sicilian (or Neopolitan) dialect. The wonders of the Internets led me to track down the meaning of the words to the Louis Prima song one night. I was very amused by what I found. I converted my inherited vinyl to digital and translated the lyrics in the first link.

The mezzogiorno polka song tells about a young woman choosing a man to be her husband. She is confused and asks her mother to decide. Her mother describes each man and his "job," giving her the same comical answer for each one, indicating for instance, that if you marry a butcher, he will "sausage" you; if you marry a carpenter, he will "hammer" you; if you marry a farmer, he will "plough" you. Obviously, the song is one big double entendre. Here's the best translation that I found: link

In many ways, the 1960's and earlier times were not more innocent times--people just had better imaginations.