Fado, the Portuguese soul music
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LISBON: José de Oliveira bellows, occasionally off key, the melancholic songs known as fado.
But questionable talent does not inhibit the 70-year-old retired welder from taking over the floor at A Baiuca, a tiny tavern and restaurant, and keeping the two dozen diners captive (or perhaps prisoner) until past midnight.
When he sings a well-known song of love, longing and loss, the good-natured diners put down their knives and forks and join in. When one couple dare to whisper during the song, a woman shushes them with the classic retort, "Silence! Fado is being sung."
This is the ritual of fado, performed night after night with various degrees of authenticity, quality, kitsch and tourist appeal in the dinner clubs of Lisbon.
Reviled by some as backward-looking and morose, fado, whose name means fate, has been reinvented to become Portugal's most successful cultural export. But here, in the narrow, twisting alleyways of Alfama, one of the working-class districts where fado was born, the songs are the classics, the message unadorned.
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De Oliveira, dressed in a somber vest and trousers, his tie tightly knotted, is a neighborhood fixture. He sits on a stool at the restaurant's entrance as an unofficial doorman, beckoning passers-by to enter.
"José doesn't have a good voice, but he loves fado, he breathes fado," said Henrique Gascon, the owner of A Baiuca. "Sometimes people cry when he sings."
There is no stage, no microphone, no spotlight, not even candles here. It's the kind of place that hangs a "no smoking" sign on the door, then puts ashtrays on the tables.
When de Oliveira's voice cracks one time too many, João de Jesus, a 33-year- old owner of a fire extinguisher company, steps in to take his place.
Inspired, it is believed, by African slave and Moorish songs, fado was transformed by Portuguese sailors in the early 19th century into a vehicle to express the pain of loneliness and danger of a life at sea.
During the 40-year era of dictatorship that gripped Portugal until 1974, fado was associated with the regime's rigid values, and was used to promote nationalism.
As prime minister in the 1980s, Mário Soares once took American journalists traveling with President Ronald Reagan to a famous casa de fado, even though he was in exile during the dictatorship, and was said to have hated the genre.
Even now, some Portuguese consider fado fatalistic, a reminder that Portugal remains that worst-performing economy among the 13 countries that use the euro and lags behind much of the rest of Europe. "Saudade," a concept essential to fado that blends the nostalgia and yearning associated with the Portuguese character, is also seen by some as the main obstacle to progress.
Prime Minister José Sócrates, who was overwhelmingly elected nearly two years ago on a pledge to modernize Portugal, has mixed feelings about fado.
"Fado is about nostalgia, a sadness that is very intimate," Sócrates said in an interview. "I'm not a huge fan."
But he does not renounce it. "Fado," he said, "must have the right environment and the singers must be very special, to give it both beauty and a high standing."
Certainly, there is a lot of bad fado singing in Portugal — as there is a lot of bad flamenco dancing and singing in Spain, and it sometimes seems more popular among outsiders than among the Portuguese.
When Bill Clinton visited Portugal as president in 2000, he confessed to having fallen in love with fado.
"I'm going to promote fado music all over the world!" he exclaimed.
The legendary queen of fado singer, Amália Rodrigues, defined the genre. She wore the traditional black dress and shawl and was accompanied by the pear-shaped 12-string Portuguese guitar. When Amália, as she was known, died in 1999, Portugal declared three days of mourning.
More than a decade ago, a younger generation of singers began to take over and revolutionize fado.
Mariza, a 33-year-old Mozambique- born fado diva who sang a duet with Sting for the 2004 summer Olympics, has added cellos, pianos, trumpets, a positive attitude and designer gowns to her performances.
Fado singer Katia Guérreiro used her voice to campaign as a youth leader for Aníbal Cavaco Silva during his successful campaign for the 2006 presidential elections and to protest the referendum to liberalize abortion in February.
Mísia, meanwhile, uses a violin and poetic interpretations to inspire her work.
"When I decided to devote myself to fado, my friends were horrified," said Mísia before a recent performance in Paris, where she now lives. "It had the stigma of the dictatorship that used fado as propaganda for Portugal as a place that was happy in its poverty."
