Where fado began...

...more or less. Things I learned in Lisbon. Historical marker at what was (in theory) once the place where lived Maria Severa Onofriana, or A Severa, a tall, elegant and gracious prostitute who sang in taverns and bars and was known not only for her singing and guitar playing but her aristocratic lovers. She is the first known great fadista (singer, female or male, of fado) and the subject of a novel, a play and the first Portuguese "talkie," all titled A Severa.

I think fado is very much like blues and jazz, originally a music of outsiders, outlaws and outcasts fashioned as a means of coping with difficult lives and protesting the injustices in which that difficulty was rooted while promoting cultural identification and solidarity.

Later, it becomes accepted by the so-called better elements of society and then a darling of the intelligentsia, particulary when Amália Rodrigues, the greatest of fadistas, and her favorite composer Alain Oulman begin to marry fado music with serious, landmark Portuguese poetry.

Yet, I posit, like jazz and blues, fado even as a now respected and mostly respectable art form, retains the intrinsic qualities that make it exciting (my grandmother would probably have said racy) and powerful. Fado, likewise, has roots in the music and dance of Africa and African slaves, in Brazil and elsewhere in the former Portuguese empire. Sound familiar?