Francesco De Gregori

An Italian singer-songwriter and a former US president, sitting side by side in the heart of New York, talking about freedom, Bob Dylan, war, social media and… "Buffalo Bill". The curious encounter between Francesco De Gregori and Bill Clinton took place in 2022, during "Change The World", an initiative organized by the Associazione Diplomatici that brought together thousands of students from all over the world in the American metropolis for a simulation of United Nations proceedings. The dialogue was moderated by Claudio Corbino, president of the association.
De Gregori had also just come from a concert at the Manhattan Center and made no secret of his emotion at finding himself in conversation with the 42nd president of the United States: "An artist's life can seem strange and full of who-knows-what adventures. But who would have told me that one day I'd be talking face to face with a president of the United States?" "Well, it's a great pleasure for me too. I mean it," Clinton replied.

Between life and death, I would have chosen America

Before the debate, De Gregori gave a speech that was, above all, a declaration of love for American culture — albeit one far from uncritical. For his generation, he recalled, the United States had represented, in the 1960s and 70s, "a breaking point for the dominant culture of the time", opening up new spaces of freedom through literature, film, music and art. It's an influence the Roman singer-songwriter has repeatedly acknowledged as decisive in shaping him as well: "Even I, who did draw inspiration from many great Italian authors, certainly wouldn't have gone into this line of work if I hadn't 'stumbled' at a certain point onto Bob Dylan. And in any case, I would certainly have done it differently."
In the subsequent conversation with Clinton, De Gregori broadened the picture, recalling Fellini and his childhood love for the American western, then Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, comic books, Donald Duck and Superman, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and even blue jeans. Everything that arrived from the United States, he explained, seemed back then to carry with it "new artistic languages, new styles" capable of challenging established conventions: "It was a formidable lesson in nonconformity for young people at the time. Something wonderfully and peacefully 'revolutionary'."
Clinton picked up especially on the reference to Dylan: "It's nice that you mentioned Bob Dylan — do you know he's into sculpture now? I think voices like his will keep living on, we need them more and more." It was no coincidental affinity. De Gregori had also recalled how, on January 17, 1993, on the eve of Clinton's inauguration at the White House, Dylan had sung "Chimes Of Freedom" during the celebrations marking the start of the new presidency. Those "chimes of freedom" thus became the ideal link between his own artistic upbringing and the central theme of the meeting. And it was freedom itself, even more than America as such, that was the thread running through De Gregori's speech. The singer-songwriter recalled Clinton's 1994 visit to the American military cemetery in Nettuno, reading into that tribute to the fallen of World War II a warning that remains relevant today: freedom can never be taken for granted once and for all, but must be defended day after day. A principle that, in his reflection, also concerned the defeated and the young men "sent to die on the wrong side of history".

The debate then moved on to the tragedy of current conflicts such as the war in Ukraine. "We were young dreamers when we saw the Berlin Wall fall. We thought we would never live through a new nightmare. I'm afraid the two great blocs are re-forming, and we risk turning back the clock fifty years," De Gregori observed. Clinton responded by shifting the focus to the relationship between power and individual freedom: "One of the great questions of this new era is whether power can respect people's freedom of choice, both as individuals and as communities and nations." The former president warned against systems in which "someone always decides for you", arguing that even those who wield power end up losing touch with what society actually thinks. From there came his hope that the students would build a future grounded "more in cooperation than in conflict".

Between the buffalo and the locomotive

It was at that point that De Gregori turned to one of his old songs to translate the concept into an image. And he chose precisely "Bufalo Bill", written when he was little more than twenty and dedicated to one of the founding myths of the American imagination: "I hope he'll forgive me now for quoting one of my own songs, but it seems useful to do so, both because I was roughly the same age as these kids when I wrote it, and because it's precisely about a great American myth, Buffalo Bill. In the song, he loudly declares his nonconformist, freedom-loving calling when he says that while 'the locomotive has its path laid out, the buffalo can swerve aside and fall'. It's clear that Buffalo Bill's sympathies, and mine too, lie entirely with the animal, which, unlike the locomotive forced to travel on rigid steel tracks, can choose its own path and even risk breaking its neck for the sake of being free. So I hope that an 'old' artist like me and a great statesman like you can still hope that these young people will have in their hands all the tools they need to be as free as animals on the prairie, without ever giving in to any cultural drift that would make them more and more like a locomotive on a fixed track."
An explanation that made explicit one of the song's most famous metaphors: the buffalo as the embodiment of the possibility of swerving, making mistakes and even falling; the locomotive as a symbol of an efficient modernity bound to an already fixed course. Freedom, in De Gregori's own reading, therefore also carries the risk of falling: it doesn't simply mean reaching one's destination, but having the ability to choose one's own path.
Clinton seemed to particularly appreciate that metaphor: "That's a beautiful image in your song. And it's certainly my hope too. The generation of eighteen-, twenty-year-olds is better than ours, I have no doubt about that. We have to believe in them."

The conversation went on to touch on many other topics. De Gregori asked Clinton about the possibility of cooperation between the United States and China, and the former president replied that, while economic, scientific and technological competition remained inevitable, collaboration between the two powers would be essential to tackling the climate crisis. They also talked about the internet and social media, their weight in shaping political consensus, and the role taken on by new technologies in warfare. Clinton stressed above all the emergence of a kind of global public opinion: through the same films, books and music, young people can recognize in one another someone far more similar to themselves than traditional wartime rhetoric would suggest.

The meaning of "Bufalo Bill"

But that New York dialogue inevitably led back to the very origins of "Bufalo Bill", one of the pivotal albums in De Gregori's career. The 1976 record was born almost as a reaction to the enormous success of "Rimmel": it was recorded in little more than a week, with a stripped-down, almost live approach, because its author wanted to move away from the polish of the previous record. At its center was that very America which, so many years later, De Gregori would evoke before Clinton: a promised land and, at the same time, a territory of disillusionment, a place of freedom and of the contradictions of consumer society. An America filtered through Dylan, Hemingway, Kerouac and Steinbeck, but observed without giving in either to anti-Americanism or to unconditional fascination with the myth.
The spark for the title track, however, also came from Europe. De Gregori was struck by "American Riding Act", a lithograph by the German expressionist Otto Dix depicting fake Native Americans against the backdrop of the American flag. To that image was added Sam Peckinpah's "The Ballad of Cable Hogue", with its pioneer overwhelmed by modernity: the sunset of the old West in the face of the advance of machines and the new industrial society.

William Frederick Cody thus becomes, in the song, a deliberately ambiguous myth: buffalo hunter, frontiersman, "American bullfighter", "gullible and romantic", and finally a sideshow freak forced to turn his own legend into an attraction for the "Peace and Goodwill" circus. Around him, America changes too: the prairie gets fenced in, the market replaces adventure, show business swallows up even the heroes of the frontier.
This is where the contrast between the buffalo and the locomotive emerges. On one side, progress running along rigid, predetermined tracks; on the other, an animal that retains the possibility of swerving, even at the risk of falling.

Nearly half a century after writing that song, standing before Bill Clinton and thousands of young people who had come to New York from every corner of the world, De Gregori chose that very image to explain what still fascinated him about America: the promise of the possibility of swerving aside and choosing a different path. A hope that today seems to shatter against the reality of another America, one far more like the locomotive — and without even any certain tracks left ahead of it.

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18/09/2026