You Ain't Been Blue

FOLKSINGERS

In Portugal, Amalia Rodrigues is considered the world's greatest singer. When she sings on television, theaters empty; there are fist fights in the cafes, and worried queues leading to the squares that have public television sets. At 43, she is everything to Lisbon that Edith Piaf was to Paris, and because she is a singer of fados, she is also considered a liberator, a philosopher, an antagonist, a revolutionary.

She is, in fact, a kind of savior. When she became a fadista in the late '30s, the fados were in bad flower because of their unpleasant exaltation of poverty, disease and death. Amalia, reeking of pathos, rescued the art of the fado by lifting its emotional sights to the level of pain, nostalgia and despair. Such suffering is delicious to the Portuguese, and the fados cover everything--defeated souls, wasted nights, strange shadows. Americans who have a feeling for the blues can understand the spirit of the fado, but you ain't really been blue till you've felt the fado.

Bed & Bullfights. Fados sound like torch songs sung from the top of a mosque: sobs, wails, cries from the soul. Even when performed by as dulcet a fadista as Amalia, they are more forlorn than a foghorn, more despairing than a moan. Fado means destiny in Portuguese, and the Weltschmerz of a good fado gets a physical grip on its audience; like "ffillie Holiday's blues, fados encourage a state of mind well beyond the reach of popular music.

Some scholars hear in fados "the sweet crying" of African slave songs or Gregorian chants. By the 18th century, Portuguese sailors were singing the sad songs to prostitutes, who sang them to aristocrats and other opinion makers. The first great fadista was Maria Severa, a gypsy prostitute who sang in a low-life casa do fado in the 1830s. She devoted her 26 dissolute years to bed and bullfights, wine and fado, and her legend is so much with the Portuguese that fadistas still wear black shawls in mourning for her.

Ashes & Fire. Portuguese love the fado most when they are away from Portugal; saudade, an untranslatable word that means something like galloping nostalgia, occurs in nearly every song. But even at home, the Portuguese seem eager to have their hearts broken. "A wild group of students can roar into a tavern," a medical student says wonderingly, "and immediately they become despondent, wailing their favorite fado." Positive-thinking Portuguese try unsuccessfully to combat this downbeat sense of life; if such songs must be sung, a Portuguese intellectual has urged, "let us suffer en famille and avoid letting foreigners think we have invented a new kind of yawn."

Fado's dark charms are, indeed, perceivable beyond Portugal. Amalia has sung in New York and Hollywood, made a dozen successful visits to Bra zil and just finished a triumphant engagement in Mexico City. But back home, her spell is so strong that she easily persuades Portugal's leading intellectuals and composers to write songs for her, thus taking the national art form from the hands of the dejected lovers and sentimental ladies who anonymously contribute most fado lyrics.

Some purists say that the heart of the fado still lies beyond Amalia, beyond Lisbon's boulevards, and deep in its slums. There illiterate workers still exchange quatrains of their own invention. Aristocrats repeat them over murky wine and grilled sardines, and eventually the word reaches Amalia. Then, full of fire and ashes, sorrow and sin, she sings:

I do not know, nor does anyone else, Why I sing the fado in this hurt tone Of pain and sorrow. In this torment full of anguish I feel that my soul regains its calm With the verses I sing.

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