Nicola Paone was born in 1915 in Barnesboro, as the only son among a coal miner's five children. In 1923, the family returned to Sicily, and the boy grew up in a village, absorbing elders' stories and learning music. His mother died when he was 9, which he said helped him sing about heartbreak. At 15, with his father's blessing, he returned to the United States to live with his sister in the Bronx. He worked as a shoeshine boy, hat blocker and busboy at an Italian restaurant. He learned the jewelry trade to pay for instruction to be an opera singer. He was a baritone. He opened his own jewelry store in 1942 and became known for his singing of radio commercials, an act he repeated in the early 1990's when he crooned jingles promoting his restaurant on the radio. When he could find no company willing to record him, he set up his own company, Etna Records. His first record, ''U Sciccareddu,'' or ''The Little Donkey,'' became an overnight hit and established his ''from the heart style of bittersweet storytelling,'' in the phrase of the 1994 academic paper. He ranged beyond the Italian theater to find a wider audience for the act, playing the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Palace Theater on Broadway. He signed briefly with both Columbia and RCA, but preferred his own record label. His songs were more and more in broken English and less and less in Italian. ''The Telephone No Ring,'' in which an Italian-American is exasperated by the insensitivity of an American operator, sold five million copies. He wrote about 175 compositions in Italian and English, and his success helped persuade the jazz musician Louis Prima to perform similar Italian-style material. Mr. Paone was also popular in South America, where he was known as the Italian Troubadour and performed in a black cape with silver lining. On May 1, 1954, he sang his trademark song, ''Uei Paesano,'' or ''My Countryman,'' to more than 700,000 people who had gathered in Buenos Aires to protest against the government. They left peacefully. His appeal was greatest for Italian-Americans still not quite embedded in American life. In songs like ''The Bigga Professor,'' he encouraged immigrants to laugh at themselves unashamedly. In 1958, when he was touring Italy and called home, he did not recognize his son's changing voice. ''My God, I lost my son,'' he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1992. He soon quit singing professionally, just after he opened his restaurant, around the time that Cash Box magazine listed his ''Blah, Blah, Blah'' as the No. 1 song in the nation on Jan. 31, 1959. But he continued to warble each morning as he personally baked all the day's desserts, including a legendary chocolate cream cake. At evening's end, he followed another ritual. He brushed his shoes with the same brush he had used as a shoeshine boy in the Bronx. ''The consistent theme is that hyphenated Italians are warm, open, clever, insightful people who are full of life,'' in the words of a paper presented to a symposium of the American Italian Historical Association in 1994. The paper, ''Nicola Paone: Narrator of the Italian-American Experience,'' was written by Pamela R. and Salvatore Primeggia and Joseph J. Bentivegna and published in the book ''Italian Americans in a Multicultural Society'' (Forum Italicum, 1994). Mr. Paone went on to a second career as a restaurateur, opening Nicola Paone, an Italian restaurant at 207 East 34th Street, in 1958. His customers included every mayor from Wagner to Giuliani as well as William F. Buckley Jr., a regular who named a fictional spy after Mr. Paone. There was also what Mr. Paone called ''the salad show,'' an elaborate production that ended in a garlicky Caesar salad. He sometimes accompanied the show by singing a 17-verse song he wrote about Caesar salad. ''I like to make people smile,'' he often said. After a long absence from the stage, he began singing again. Mr. Paone and his wife, Delia, had lived in an Albuquerque nursing home for about a year. They had moved there to be near their son, Joseph, who died in August 2003.
Mr. Paone, whose last name was pronounced Pay-OH-nee, was popular in Italy and South America as well as the United States. Mr. Paone is survived by two grandchildren. His wife, Delia, died in 2006.