Junior Soprano Sings! (Without Revealing Family Secrets)

NEW YORK —  Notice to “Sopranos” fans: Uncle Junior is singing.

Well, not to the Feds. But, with any luck, to the masses.

“I am a good actor, but I think I am a better singer,” said Dominic Chianese, who plays the crusty elder statesman of the Soprano clan, Uncle Junior. Chianese is strumming a bit on his guitar in the conference room of a midtown Manhattan film studio. It is a light Italian tune. “Let’s put it this way: I have more passion about my singing.”

Chianese, sans the Uncle Junior floppy hat, looks more distinguished and a little softer in real life--guitar in hand, he’s more Pete Seeger than grizzled mobster. That is how the 70-year-old Chianese would like it. While he pays homage to Uncle Junior, crediting the role for finally enabling him to snatch the brass ring, he yearns for another niche.

“The Uncle Junior thing has been given to me as a gift and it’s going to be my hook into the business,” Chianese said. “I think I am a good enough performer to eventually dissolve that.”

Chianese had managed to make a living as a New York actor for nearly half a century before being cast in the hit, now in its third season on HBO. He has had character roles in TV shows from “Dark Shadows” and “East Side, West Side” to “Kojak” and “Law & Order.” His theater credits include “The Rose Tattoo” and David Mamet’s “Water Engine.” He was Johnny Ola in “The Godfather, Part II” and appeared in New Yorky flicks such as “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Night Falls on Manhattan.”

But now he is part of water-cooler chat. People stop him when he walks down the street. After 50 years of performing, he is reaching celebrity. He hopes he is taking it in the right way. “I may have gotten a bit of success just as I am wise enough to use it,” he said.

Chianese grew up in the Belmont section of the Bronx, the scion of a bricklaying family. “They were all immigrants, Italian mostly,” he said. “There were some Jewish candy stores and maybe one Spanish kid. And all Irish teachers, who were probably grandchildren of the original Irish who came over in the potato famine. It was a beautiful neighborhood.”

But not a neighborhood where many kids went off to college, even those like Chianese, who graduated from the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. Like his grandfather and father before him, he went off instead to a well-paying, secure bricklaying job. One day when he was 21, on his way home after work, he got off the bus back to the Bronx at East 74th Street in Manhattan.

“My father asked why and I told him, ‘For singing,’ ” said Chianese. “I got my first professional singing job that day.”

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It was the early 1950s and the job was with a touring Gilbert & Sullivan troupe. He rushed home to show his mom the $110-a-week contract; for his family it was a pirate’s fortune. Chianese toured the U.S. doing “The Mikado” for a year, but by late 1952 he was back bricklaying.

“It wasn’t like having a regular job,” he said. “I can’t explain it. It was too different. I could have stayed, but I was consumed with guilt. I left and went back to the old ways.”

He got married quickly and then got the marriage annulled. He did that a second time. He started going to school at Brooklyn College while continuing to lay brick. In the late ‘50s, though, he tried out for summer stock.

“I went the apprentice route and finally earned my Actors Equity card. Then I felt I earned my right to be an actor,” he said. At 30, he got the Brooklyn College degree and by then was on his third marriage.

“Nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn. Three beautiful kids. But trying to be an actor with three kids, that’s doing things the hard way. So that marriage broke up.”

But he found love in the guitar, which he picked up in 1962. Like many novice players in that time, he drifted to Greenwich Village, and by 1964, he was the singing emcee at Gerde’s Folk City.

“I would sing a couple of songs and then introduce everybody,” he said. “Arlo Guthrie, John Lee Hooker, Jose Feliciano, David Bromberg.”

In some ways now, Chianese wants to recapture that era of his life. He is doing a series of concerts at the West Bank Cafe in midtown with former Folk City performers. He sings “Guantanamera” on an Internet film called “The White Rose,” both the song and the film based on the poems of Jose Marti, the 19th century Cuban revolutionary poet.

Chianese said the success of “The Sopranos” has already gotten him noticed. He was on a promotion junket in Nashville and picked up a guitar to play one song. By the next day, a record producer had come to New York to encourage him to sign a recording contract. The partly ironically named “Dominic Chianese Hits” CD is scheduled for release this summer by Madacy Entertainment. His metier is a bit folky, a bit country, mostly participatory.

“Sopranos” fans should not worry that Chianese is forsaking Uncle Junior just yet. He loves playing the character and finds him deeply compelling.

“All Italian boys are always looking for their mothers,” he said. “Uncle Junior never got married. When a woman talks [to Junior] about a sexual thing, he hits her with a pie and gets rid of her after 16 years. She had to be perfect. He is just looking . . . for someone like his mommy.”

Chianese is baffled by those who complain that “The Sopranos” stereotypes Italians as mobsters. “Actually, I think that is why ‘The Sopranos’ is popular. It doesn’t show a Mafia person as Mafia only, but also as a human being,” he said. “It is connected to the need to survive.

“The Italians were writers, artists, architects. Any idiot knows that. I call those people ‘irony deficient.’ Life is ironic. You can have a tough guy who sings. That is how you define irony.”

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Chianese, married and divorced a fourth time, with six children from the two later marriages and 11 grandchildren, said he would still take on acting parts, but finds small roles to be his forte. He is doing three of them this year in films, in addition to his singing gig in “The White Rose” (which can be seen on https://alwaysi.com).

“I want to be the next Sam Jaffe. Remember him? ‘Gunga Din.’ Boy was he great!” said Chianese. “I’ll be an old Sam Jaffe. I’ll play an old philosopher, the spiritual guy. Like the old guy in ‘Razor’s Edge’ who tells Tyrone Power, ‘Boy, you’ve got to follow your heart,’ that kind of thing.

“Grandfatherly and telling how to aspire . . . Like Uncle Junior, only the flip side.”

* “The Sopranos” can be seen Sunday nights at 9 on HBO, with repeats through the week.