King of the Vaudeville Accordion: The Italian Roots of Guido Deiro

Documented family tree & key facts

Guido Pietro Deiro — b. Salto (Salto Canavese), 1 September 1886; d. 1950.
Parents: Carlo Deiro (b. 15 July 1863) × Giovanna Maria Mussatto (b. c. 1863), m. Valperga, 24 March 1883.

Paternal line — Deiro (Salto, Canavese — prov. Turin)

Stefano Deiro × Rosa (late 1700s, Salto) — furthest documented
↓
Carlo Domenico Deiro (b. 22 December 1814, Salto) × Maria Antonia Cortese
↓
Pietro Deiro (b. 28 June 1839, Salto) × Maria Chiarottino (m. Borgiallo, 30 April 1860)
↓
Carlo Deiro (b. 15 July 1863, Salto)
↓
Guido Pietro Deiro (b. 1 September 1886) — to the U.S., New York, 30 October 1909

Maternal line — Mussatto (Pratiglione / Valperga, Canavese)

Domenico Mussatto × Giovanna Turigliatto (Pratiglione) — furthest documented
↓
Tommaso Mussatto (b. c. 1825, Pratiglione; d. Valperga, 28 January 1881), farmer × Anna Vacca
↓
Giovanna Maria Mussatto (b. c. 1863, Prascorsano) — Guido’s mother

Worth knowing

The first piano-accordionist to headline American vaudeville, records, radio and screen. His younger brother Pietro Deiro was also a celebrated accordionist.

Documented by original acts — Salto, Borgiallo and Valperga civil and parish registers, and Guido’s U.S. naturalization. Anything earlier than the names marked “furthest documented” is not yet proven and is left out.

Before the microphone, before radio and film, the sound that could fill a theatre without an orchestra was the accordion — and the man who first made it a headline act on the American stage was a fruit-seller’s son from a farming hamlet in the Piedmontese hills. His name was Guido Deiro. He is remembered as the first piano-accordionist to top the bill in big-time vaudeville, the first to record the instrument, the first to carry it onto radio and the screen — and, according to a story Hollywood never tired of repeating, as a husband, however briefly, of Mae West.

The surprise is not the fame. It is the distance travelled: from a house numbered 23 in the Borgata Cosetti of Salto Canavese, where his father sold fruit and his grandfathers worked the land, to a $600-a-week marquee on the American vaudeville circuit — one lifetime, and an ocean, apart.

The birth record

Guido Pietro Deiro was born on 1 September 1886, at half past nine in the morning, in the house at Borgata Cosetti no. 23, in the Comune of Salto (Salto Canavese), in the mountainous Canavese district north of Turin. His birth act (no. 46) records the father, Carlo Deiro, twenty-three, a fruit merchant (negoziante di frutta), appearing the next day before the mayor to declare that his wife, Maria Mussatto, a countrywoman (contadina), had given birth to a son, to whom he gave the names Guido Pietro. Three days later the child was carried to the parish church of San Giacomo and baptised; the register names his grandfather Pietro Deiro as godfather.

That grandfather’s name, and the family behind it, is where the story opens out — because Guido did not come from nowhere. He came from a line of the Canavese soil that the parish books trace back, generation by generation, into the eighteenth century.

A family of the Canavese soil

There was no palazzo and no title in the Deiro past — only land, and the small hard trades of the mountain valleys. The records show five generations rooted in the same handful of Canavese villages.

The line begins with Stefano Deiro, living at Salto in the years of Napoleon, and his wife Rosa. Their son Carlo Domenico Deiro was born at Salto on 22 December 1814 and married Maria Antonia Cortese. Carlo’s son Pietro Deiro — Guido’s grandfather — was born at Salto on 28 June 1839; on 30 April 1860, in the church of San Nicolao at nearby Borgiallo, he married Maria Chiarottino, a girl of twenty from Chiesanuova, daughter of the village carpenter. Pietro worked as a farmer and fruit-seller; Maria Chiarottino lived on until 1901, dying at Salto at sixty-two.

Their son Carlo Deiro, Guido’s father, was born at Salto on 15 July 1863. On 24 March 1883, in the town hall of Valperga, he married Giovanna Maria Mussatto, a countrywoman of nineteen born at Prascorsano, daughter of the late Tommaso Mussatto and of Anna Vacca of Valperga. Both bride and groom were still minors, and the act carefully records the consent of the parents on both sides. From that marriage came a houseful of Deiro children at Salto: Guido Pietro in 1886, then Pietro in 1888 — who would grow up to be a famous accordionist in his own right — and Vittorio Giacomo in 1890, among others.

It is worth pausing on what these papers do not say. They give no coats of arms, no titles, none of the rural nobility that later legend would drape over the Deiro name. What they record is humbler and truer: contadini — farmers — and a father and grandfather who sold fruit. The genius that carried the accordion across America grew out of a Piedmontese hill family that had, for a century and more, simply worked.

The boy who would not marry the farm

Music reached Guido early. By family account it was an uncle, Fred Deiro, who first put an accordion in his hands, and he went on to study under the noted Italian accordionist-composer Giovanni Gagliardi. But the Canavese offered a farmer’s son one future, and it did not include the stage. The story his family preserved is that Guido left Italy in part to escape an arranged marriage — turning his back on the settled life the valley had mapped for him.

He played first across the border, in France and Germany, learning the young piano-accordion — the keyboard instrument that was then replacing the old button box. Then he crossed the Atlantic. His United States naturalization petition, filed years later in San Francisco, fixes the moment precisely: he emigrated from Le Havre and arrived at the port of New York on 30 October 1909, aboard the steamship La Touraine. By January 1910 he had settled in California, the state that would make him famous.

The vaudeville king

Guido Deiro reached the American stage at the instant the piano-accordion was ready to be heard, and he made himself its voice. He had demonstrated the instrument at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle, and in 1910 he stepped onto the vaudeville stage in San Francisco. Within a season he was a headliner — billed, in time, as the first piano-accordionist to top big-time vaudeville, and the first to carry the instrument onto records, radio and the screen. At his height he commanded an extraordinary $600 a week, among the best-paid musicians on the circuit.

He was also, in 1911–1912, one of the first accordionists ever to make sound recordings, cutting a long series of sides — more than a hundred titles across his career. His own composition Kismet (1911) became his signature, a piece so popular it lent its name to a Broadway show and echoed through the film years. For a generation of Americans, and for the immigrant families who packed the cheaper seats, the sound of the modern accordion simply was the sound of Guido Deiro.

And there is a symmetry the Deiro story shares with more than one immigrant family: two brothers, one art. Guido’s younger brother Pietro Deiro (born at Salto in 1888) followed him to America and became a celebrated accordionist and teacher in his own right — later remembered as ‘the daddy of the accordion.’ Between the two brothers ran a lifelong, good-natured rivalry over which of them had truly been first.

Mae West, and the years after

Here the documented life brushes against Hollywood legend. According to a much-repeated story, Guido Deiro was for a time the husband of the young actress Mae West — a marriage said to have taken place around 1914 and to have ended a few years later. West’s own accounts and the surviving records are contradictory, and the marriage has never been firmly documented; it belongs, for now, among the things a careful biographer flags rather than affirms. What is certain is that Deiro moved through the same brilliant, unstable world of early American show business, and that his name was linked with one of its brightest stars.

When the United States entered the First World War, Deiro served in the U.S. Army in 1918; in 1927, in the District Court at San Francisco, he became an American citizen, renouncing, as the printed oath required, his allegiance to the King of Italy. In the 1930s he ran accordion studios and taught — among his pupils the young virtuoso Dick Contino — but the studios did not survive the Second World War. He fell ill in 1947 and died in 1950, at the age of sixty-three. His legacy is kept today by his son, Count Guido Roberto Deiro, and by the scholars and reissue labels who have gathered his recordings back into print.

What the records say

The Italian half of this story is documented act by act, five generations deep, and every generation is a family of the Canavese working world — not a line of nobility, whatever later tellings have claimed. It runs from Stefano Deiro and his wife Rosa at Salto; to their son Carlo Domenico (b. 1814); to Pietro (b. 1839), the farmer and fruit-seller who married Maria Chiarottino of Chiesanuova in 1860; to Carlo (b. 1863), the fruit merchant who married Giovanna Maria Mussatto of Prascorsano in 1883; to their son Guido Pietro Deiro (b. 1886). The child baptised at San Giacomo di Salto, with his own grandfather standing as godfather, is the same man who, a quarter-century later, made a Piedmontese farmer’s instrument sing from the marquees of America.

Curious how a record like these is read? Our short lesson walks through a real nineteenth-century Italian birth act, field by field: How to Read an Italian Birth Record.

The documents behind the story

Every Italian generation above rests on an original civil or parish act of the Canavese, located in the registers of Salto, Chiesanuova, Borgiallo and Valperga; the American chapter rests on Guido’s own naturalization papers. Here they are, in order.

Documented genealogical research by Clemente Suardi. To trace and document your own Italian family, act by act, request a free preliminary evaluation. Period photographs of Guido Deiro are reproduced as vintage publicity images; rights remain with their respective holders.