It's said that the fascist dictatorship that dominated Portugal for nearly half a century was bolstered by the three Fs - football, Fatima and fado. Football was best exemplified by the all-conquering Benfica side of the early 1960s, while Fatima referred to the Portuguese town where three teenagers are believed to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary, establishing the sanctity of Portugal.
And then there's the fado, Portugal's most famous musical form. It's forever associated with the tremulous voice of Amalia Rodrigues (1920-1999), who appeared dressed in a black shawl to sing dramatic, minor-key ballads in a remarkable voice, sounding like she was on the verge of tears. But for some, it's a sound forever tarnished by its association with fascism. After the fall of the dictatorship in 1974, many on the Portuguese left saw the fado as something shameful. It was seen, at best, as a conservative outlet for national misery, at worst as an authorised voice for Catholic fascism.
Young Portuguese deserted the fado in the 1970s," says singer Mariza, part of a new wave of fado singers, or fadistas, who have reclaimed the genre in recent years. "It had too many bad associations. Only now can we revisit this music."
Amalia become something of a scapegoat for fado's perceived fascist flirtations. Her ascendance to international celebrity in the 1940s unfortunately coincided with the rise of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, who ruled Portugal between 1932 and 1968, the dictatorship continuing under the leadership of Marcelo Caetano until the peaceful "carnation revolution" of 1974.
Amalia unwittingly encouraged an association with the regime. She confessed to having a crush on Salazar, even writing poems to him in hospital before his death in 1968. In the aftermath of the 1974 revolution, she was falsely accused of being an agent for Salazar's secret police, a slur that stuck for many years, while many were suspicious of her association with Salazar's minister of culture, Antonio Ferro, who championed her work and presented her around the world as an ambassador for Portugal. She was certainly treated well by the regime, at a time when many singers, songwriters and poets were being imprisoned as dissidents.
However, if Salazar's regime used Amalia and the fado as a symbol of national identity in the 1950s and 60s, they did so with great reluctance. Salazar hated the fado. He referred to Amalia as "the little creature", and struggled with fado's central trope of saudade, the sense of nostalgia, yearning or longing that dominates its lyrics, regarding it as essentially anti-modern. In 1952, he told his biographer Christine Garnier that fado "has a softening influence on the Portuguese character", one that "sapped all energy from the soul and led to inertia". But even he could not quell fado's popularity.
"The regime did not use the fado as a tool for propaganda," says fado historian Michael Colvin, assistant professor of Hispanic studies at Marymount Manhattan College in New York. "Rather, the fado's popularity had become such that the government had no choice but to make the song a part of the consecrated national repertoire. Through censorship, Salazar insured that it did not blatantly contradict the regime's notion of progress; and by promoting the 'poor but happy' - pobrete mas alegrete - image of Lisbon's fadistas and degraded popular neighbourhoods, the government kept the potentially subversive song at bay."
"The dictatorship's relationship with fado roughly splits into two stages," says Simon Broughton, editor of the world music magazine Songlines, and director of an upcoming BBC4 documentary on fado. "From the start of the regime in 1926, Salazar dismissed it as a disreputable, lower-class, unsuitable form of music. But, from the second world war onwards, they changed tack. Fado was still massively popular, so it had to be co-opted to the government's own ends. So, while there was no outwardly fascist fado, censorship certainly neutered it in that period. The subject matter became very traditional - about wine, women, song, family and church - extolling very conservative and unchallenging images of Portugal."
By doing so, the censors sought to eradicate the fado's progressive history. Fado musicians such as the great guitarist Armandinho played at Communist party rallies in the 1920s and 30s, while the song form was explicitly used by socialist and anarchist poets in the early decades of the 20th century.
Those militant songs were eradicated by Salazar's censorship laws, but the radical tradition was kept - albeit more subtly - by songwriters in the 1960s.
Contrary to her reputation as a fascist sympathiser, Amalia often tapped into fado's radical tradition. She stayed one step ahead of the censors by singing slyly subversive songs with lyrics by leftwing poets such as Ary dos Santos, Manuel Alegre, Alexandre O'Neill and David Mourao Ferreira. She was also a generous donor to underground anti-fascist political organisations, especially the National Committee to Assist Political Prisoners.
Ruben de Carvalho, a journalist and member of the central committee of the Portuguese Communist party, says Amalia's motivations were always innocent. "She gave money to anti-fascist organisations in the same passionate and, perhaps, naive way she used when she thanked her Salazarian benefactors who gave her, a simple plebeian, the chance to appear on a stage, handling a microphone." Mario Soares, a former socialist prime minister and president in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, described her as a "a conservative woman, believing in God and naturally apolitical, who knew how to get along well with the revolution of the carnations". When Amalia died in 1999, her rehabilition was complete. The state declared three days of national mourning, and she was buried as a hero in Lisbon's National Pantheon.
Amalia's memoirs suggest a simple and apolitical figure. "We never complained about life," she writes. "Sure, we knew there were people who were different from us, otherwise there would be no revolutions. But I never heard anybody talk about that. It's the privileged classes who discuss that type of thing, not the poor."
It has been argued that fado is essentially a reactionary artform. The word translates, loosely, as "fate", and fado songs always have a belief in the inevitability of destiny. "The belief that you can't choose your own fate can be a very conservative stance," says Broughton. "And Amalia was certainly conservative."
The irony is that Amalia's recordings - especially the crackly old 78s from the 1940s and 50s - still sound eerily futuristic and utterly international in their scope. While the fascists used it as a symbol of Portuguese nationalism, the fado actually channelled hundreds of years of influences from around the Lusophone world and beyond.
The rattling sound of a Portuguese guitarra - a 12-string, pear-shaped lute - can sound like an autoharp, an Alpine zither, or a bazouki, while the music can often sound like Greek rebetika, Brazilian choro, Cuban son, Andalucian flamenco or Sephardic folksong. And Amalia's insolent voice can sound variously like a Bollywood singer, an Arabic muezzin, a soul diva, or even, on several tracks, uncannily like Antony Hegarty from Antony and the Johnsons.
The innovative musical template laid down by Amalia has been the inspiration for a new generation of fado singers. Madredeus, a Portuguese collective fronted by singer Teresa Salgueiro, have taken the fado into groundbreaking electronic territory, while songs associated with Amalia have been interpreted by young singers including Katia Guerreiro, Margarida Bessa, Misia, Cristina Branco, Joana Amendoeira and, most famously, Mariza, who has broadened the genre's scope by sourcing consciously impure influences from jazz, African, Brazilian, gospel and classical music.
In many ways, all of them are reconnecting to the pre-Salazarist fado, celebrating its vagabond ancestry and its international roots. When a Portuguese writer described the fado, in 1926 as "a song of rogues, a hymn to crime, an ode to vice, an encouragement to moral depravity, an unhealthy emanation from the centres of corruption, from the infamous habitations of the scum of society", he identified a set of associations that a new generation of fadistas wear like a badge of honour.
Björk says ...
I have to admit my ignorance here; a lot of the time I don't know what Amalia Rodriguez is singing about. But the music is so fierce, I can tell it's fighting. It's the same with religious music. I'm so tired of religion, but then you hear religious music and it inspires you. For 10 or 11 years, until I recorded Medulla, I didn't listen to vocalists; I wanted to find my own voice. Then I began to listen to listen to tons of vocalists, to choral music, and to Amalia.
And the beat goes on: a beginner's guide to fado
Amalia Rodrigues
The Art of Amalia Rodrigues, (Hemisphere/EMI)
Probably the best introduction to Amalia's work, this 18-track EMI compilation features material recorded between 1952 and 1970, and will give you an idea of where else to look if you're hooked.
Various artistsThe Story of Fado, (Capitol Hemisphere)
A 22-track collection, largely comprising 50s and 60s tracks from the EMI archive, occasionally moving into poppier and more experimental territory, but concentrating on fado legends such as Amalia Rodrigues and Herminia Silva.
Various artistsThe Rough Guide to Fado, (Rough Guides)
A 19-track collection from 2004 that has a few older artists but concentrates on new fadistas such as Mariza, Cristina Branco and Misia.
Jose "Zeca" AfonsoBaladas e Cancoes, (EMI France)
Not all fadistas are women. Afonso (1929-1987) is a kind of Portuguese Pete Seeger, a militant protest singer who became a national hero during the 1974 revolution. This 1967 album is a great collection of ballads, heavily influenced by the more poetic fado of Coimbra.
Christina Branco Post-Scriptum, (L'Empreiente Digitale)
A Gen-X Lisbonite who came to fado in her late teens, Branco was one of the first to reinvigorate the genre, with a subtle bluesiness to her delivery.
Madredeus Existir, (Capitol/Metro Blue)
There are some awful albums with names like "Chillfado" that try to update fado for a clubby generation. These abominations are not to be confused with the often inspired Madredeus, whose electronic update on fado, blended with dub, gothic chant and Argentinian tango, invokes sources as disparate as Massive Attack, Gotan Project and the Cocteau Twins.
Mariza Fado Curvo, (Times Square Records)
Dramatic, hotly hyped, Viennettahaired, half-Mozambican platinumblonde tackles plenty of songs associated with Amalia, but enlarges the traditional fado palette to incorporate strings and bossa nova.
Misia Paixoaes Diagonais Diagonais, (Erato/Detour)
The first of the new wave of fado singers, Misia links fado to a lavish pop production on this 1999 album, but retains the dignified, graceful gravity of the genre.
· Mariza and the Story of Fado will be shown on BBC4 in July
Friday April 27, 2007
