Luigi Tenco

Luigi Tenco (21 March 1938 – 27 January 1967) was an Italian singer-songwriter. He died on the night of 27 January 1967 after a performance at the Sanremo Music Festival. His death was ruled to be the result of suicide, but even decades later, a plethora of evidence in favor of murder was cause to reopen the investigation twice.

Biography

Tenco was born in Cassine (province of Alessandria) in 1938, the son of Teresa Zoccola. He never knew his father. Teresa Zoccola was married to Giuseppe Tenco and they had a son, Valentino, but the couple eventually separated and Teresa moved to Cassine. It has been rumored that Luigi Tenco was the product of an extramarital relationship between his mother and an unidentified man of the Micca family, for whom she worked at the time: potentially the sixteen-year-old son or his father. When Zoccola discovered the pregnancy, she returned to Cassine. The boy was given the name of her husband, Tenco, who died in a work accident while she was several months pregnant.

Tenco spent his childhood in Cassine and Ricaldone until 1948, when he moved to Liguria, first to Nervi and then to Genoa, where his mother had a wine shop called Enos in the quarter of La Foce. He developed an early interest in music, teaching himself to play guitar, clarinet and saxophone. During high school, Tenco founded the Jelly Roll Morton Boys Jazz band, in which Tenco played the clarinet and Bruno Lauzi, another singer later to become famous, played banjo. Gino Paoli, who would become one of Italy's most famous singers and songwriters, also played with Tenco in the band he was later involved in, I Diavoli del Rock (The Rock Devils).