Immigrant American Folk Music – Amanda Pascali and The Family (live) at McGonigel’s Mucky Duck

Bilingual singer/songwriter and lyric translator Amanda Pascali hits the stage with her band of international musicians from Argentina, Cuba, Texas, and beyond on January 9th for an intimate acoustic performance of original music and traditional songs with Mediterranean, Latin, and African influences.

Internationally acclaimed, bilingual singer/songwriter and 2021 Houston Chronicle “Musician of the Year,” Amanda Pascali was born in Queens, New York, and is based between Houston, Texas and Palermo, Sicily. Amanda has released music and performed internationally, from the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. to packed houses in Italy, Romania, and across the United States. Her latest work, To Sing and Recount, is a project to translate and revitalize the Sicilian folk songs endorsed by the US State Department and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Blending folk/Americana influences with southern Italian and Latin rhythms Pascali’s songs are powerful tales of America told through the eyes of immigrants and those who have always felt like the “other”.

With a father who was thrown out of his home country for rebelling against the government and an immigrant mother who built a career from scratch in 1980s Brooklyn, Amanda was driven from a young age to be a messenger of her family’s stories and diaspora. As the rising voice of America’s most ethnically diverse generation of young people, 25-year-old Pascali writes songs that speak to the experience of growing up as a rst-generation American. In 2023 her popularity exploded on social media following several viral videos of her song translations. Amanda’s music, now coined, Immigrant American Folk delivers a powerful narrative on being- “too foreign for here, too foreign for home, and never enough for both”.

“Listening with eyes closed, you are catapulted into a cinematic atmosphere as if you were watching a lm by Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore, which could be set in deep Sicily or just as well as in American neighborhoods full of immigrants.” — Salvo D’Addeo (Giornale di Sicilia)

This event is funded in part by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance