When the sun set behind the ship, the passengers noticed that America had vanished beyond the horizon. There was just the ocean now, and the stars visible overhead. Then, above the thrum of the engines, from one of the lounges of the Lisbon-bound liner came the plaintive sound of a steel-strung Portuguese guitar.
The instrument was soon joined by the voice of a woman singing in Portuguese, a voice like a cry, a voice that seemed to come not only from deep in her soul but the souls of generations. A song steeped in melancholy filled the room, carried out on the breeze over the Atlantic waves where for centuries Portuguese mariners had voyaged around the globe.
Amália Rodrigues was singing fado for them.
“Fado came from the sea,” she said, “from the lament for our sailors who departed and never returned.”
On that spring night in 1953 Rodrigues and her accompanists were returning to Lisbon after six months in the US. She had performed a long run of dates in Manhattan at the La Vie En Rose club, appropriately for the woman who was to fado what Edith Piaf was to chanson, baring her soul as she introduced Americans to the Portuguese musical form where opera and the blues meet.
Fado, which means fate, or destiny, is fuelled by melancholy. A sense of loss inhabits every song, every melody, every phrase. It is the embodiment of Portuguese saudade, a yearning, nostalgic grief for something indefinable, something embedded in the Portuguese character.
The best fado singers channel saudade not just through their voice and technique but through their entire being. The greatest of them all was Amália Rodrigues.
“We are a sad people,” she had told a journalist late one night after a show at La Vie En Rose. “Even when everything is all right we can see that it will still turn out badly, so we sing about our fears of the coming sadness.”
She sang on board the transatlantic liner not for a fee or the adulation of her fellow passengers, but because the music inhabited her and compelled her to sing. Crossing the Atlantic only increased that compulsion, for the roots of fado and saudade lay in that ocean, in the presence of centuries of mariners who had departed Lisbon, some never to return, others bringing home songs tinged with the influences of Africa and South America.
That night on the ship there was an extra yearning, for Lisbon itself, the home of fado and the city that made Rodrigues, known to all simply as Amália, the embodiment of Portugal itself.
For a woman so closely associated with Lisbon, Amália was born there by chance. Her parents were in the city from their home town of Fundão, 150 miles north-east of the capital, while her father looked for work.
She was never certain of her birthdate, recalling that her grandmother told her only that it was during “the time of cherries”. When they returned home a few months later, Amália was left in the city with her grandparents, the poverty in Fundão being considerably worse than in Lisbon.
She received barely three years of schooling before working full time from the age of 12 selling fruit at the docks. It was there, emerging from the harbourside bars and cafes, that she first heard the sound of fado, watching voyage-hardened sailors and dockers wiping tears from their eyes as women in black threw their heads back, closed their eyes and sang from their hearts.
According to legend, Amália began imitating them to attract custom to her fruit stall; either way it was soon clear that this young girl had a fado voice with a soul to match. She began singing at community events and celebrations around the harbour and made her professional bow at 19 at the prestigious Retiro da Severa club, singing alongside her older sister.
Within a year, Amália was the undisputed queen of fado, its first star, the performer who took the music out of the cafes and street parties and into the concert hall, not just in Lisbon but first across the Portuguese-speaking world then beyond, even on to the cinema screen. During her lifetime she would sell 30 million albums as she revolutionised the genre, embracing the tradition while also pushing its boundaries, adapting poems by the likes of Luís de Camões and performing in black ballgowns rather than the plain dresses of her peers.
If there was dark cloud over Amália’s career it was how her rise and remarkable success played out beneath the far-right Estado Novo dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. The longer the regime lasted, the more Amália was criticised as a fellow traveller at best, a collaborator at worst.
Yet fado was always the music of the poor and oppressed. In the early years of the Salazar regime, communist and anarchist poets and musicians used fado as an instrument of protest.
Supporters of the government accused Amália of collaborating with their opponents, that communist and anarchist agitators were co-opting the music as an instrument of protest being, after all, the music of the people. Salazar himself never understood fado, claiming it had “a softening influence on the Portuguese character” that “sapped all energy from the soul”.
Amália herself never made a political pronouncement – “I am a simple woman,” she said, “I know nothing” – but by the twilight of the regime in the early 1970s fado was regarded as the genre of privilege that yearned for the glories of an imperial past, its performers stooges for the regime. Amália’s popularity plummeted and she fell into bouts of serious depression.
Rehabilitation was not long in coming, however. In 1976, two years after the fall of the old regime, Amália performed at Lisbon’s Coliseum to wild acclaim and received the longest ovation the concert hall had ever witnessed. When shortly afterwards the country’s socialist leader Mário Soares awarded her Portugal’s highest honour, the Grã-Cruz da Ordem de Sant’Iago da Espada, Amália’s reputation was restored.
When she died there was an official state period of mourning during which all campaigning in Portugal’s general election was suspended. The nation grieved as if part of its soul had gone, as if Portugal itself was reduced by her absence.
Amália had taken on the burden of the sadness of generations, now it lay upon those grieving for her.
‘’I have so much sadness in me, I am a pessimist, a nihilist, everything fado demands in a singer, I have in me,’’ she said. ‘’When I am on my own, alone, tragedy comes, and solitude.’’
