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Written in fRoots issue 190, 1999


BOOK
PAUL VERNON
A History Of The Portuguese Fado
Ashgate, ISBN 1-85928-377-2. 156 pages. Includes CD. (1998)

AMÁLIA RODRIGUES
The Art Of Amália
Hemisphere 7243 4 95771 2 1 (1998)

Non-Portuguese who express an interest in the lyrical, passionate urban vocal and instrumental music known as fado are liable to be met in Portugal with the reaction “How can you possibly like it if you don’t understand the words?” Nevertheless many who don’t catch the often extemporised lyrics are drawn in by the sound of the music itself, the passionate, vibrantly soaring singing, the liquid chiming brilliance of the guitarra against the steady viola. (Ironically some of the renewed foreign interest seems to be among an audience discovering, largely via Cesaria Evora, the fado-related music of the Portuguese-colonised Cape Verde).

     A pile of fado 78s that he found in a San Francisco thrift store in 1987 was a revelation for American Paul Vernon and led him to investigate how this music arose. He describes the book A History Of The Portuguese Fado as “an interim report on a work in progress”.
      It’s a recording-centred history of people and events compiled largely from paper research, and does indeed seem interim and patchy, more like research notes than a finished work. There’s much detail of the history of fado record releases and the Portuguese record industry, chapters on the beginnings of fado and its differential evolution in Lisbon, Coimbra and Porto, and abroad, a twelve page chronology (of very limited relevance) of Portugal over the last four millennia, and a few photos, mainly from record packages, publicity material and postcards. Vernon describes the milieu of fado performance and some of his experiences in fado bars on trips he made to Portugal in 1987 and 1995, and illustrates some typical themes by English-translated extracts from songs, but few of the many footnote numbers refer to quotes from live conversations with the author, and the overall impression is of data-gathering rather than the sense and scent of fado from the inside.
      It’s a worthwhile and useful (if rather slim and expensive) documentation, but there are so few current books in English about fado (or indeed about any of the rich traditional and living Portuguese musical spectrum of which it’s one part) that it feels like there’s a more general book or two missing which might have been expected to be published before this one.
      The book itself doesn’t go in for musical analysis, but instead, rather insecurely attached to the flyleaf, there’s a substantial result of Vernon’s record-collecting quest that would stand as a significant release in its own right: a 24-track CD of otherwise rare commercial recordings made by leading and legendary vocal and instrumental fadistas from Lisboa, Coimbra, Porto and Rio de Janeiro for HMV, Odeon, Parlophone, Columbia, Homokord and Polydor between 1911 and 1944, the majority being from the 1920s.

      The most famous fado singer, Amália Rodrigues, whose career Vernon describes, doesn’t appear on the CD, but she has made large numbers of recordings and most are widely available both in Portugal and abroad. An interpreter rather than a composer, she first recorded in Brazil in 1945, and early in the 1950s, already a big star, she was signed via Valentim de Carvalho to EMI, where she remained, so in compiling The Art of Amália Hemisphere had the run of most of her catalogue, and in addition the supervising services of the same engineer who made many of the original recordings. She made some recordings of non-fado material, but the eighteen well-chosen tracks here, from sessions between 1952 (at Abbey Road) and 1970, with accompaniment by finely played guitarra and viola, are all very much imbued with it.
     

© 1999 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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