Cicerenella (traditional, 18th century)

Nobody wrote Cicerenella; it is a tarantella from Naples with castanets and tambourines, old enough that the encyclopaedias date it to the eighteenth century and spread wide enough that Abruzzo, Molise, Lazio and the Marche all claim versions. The lyric is a list of what Cicerenella has, a "rooster", a little donkey, a cat, each with a verse, and the rooster's verse is the one that gets the biggest laugh at every village festa, usually from the grandmothers.

Roberto Murolo recorded it in 1963 and the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare in 1972, which is how it reached the record-buying public, and the NCCP version is the one most Italians know. The written sources describe a children's dance song. The oral tradition is explicit about it, which is the usual arrangement with folk songs and the reason this entry is labelled interpreted.

Its afterlife is that it has none, in the sense that it never went away: it is still danced, still taught, still sung at weddings and saints' days, and still the first dirty joke many southern Italian children learn without knowing it. On a list that reaches back to 1935 for its blues, this is the entry that reaches back two more centuries for the same joke, and the rooster has outlived every censor since.