There's a big wide mysterious world of music out there beyond the borders of North American culture, and has been for years. Recent fascination with all things world has only begun to scratch the surface of what we've been missing out on with our format-blinkered radio programming. I feel fairly safe in saying that outside of a few specialty radio stations, fado, the mournful music of Portugal, gets almost no airplay.
Literally translated, fado means fate or destiny and is said to have originated among the Portuguese sailors who travelled the world with the likes of Magellan and da Gama over 400 years ago. The Portuguese word saudade, which combines our feelings of longing, bittersweet nostalgia, homesickness, and all the pain and love associated with those feelings, is most probably the wellspring for the emotional depth of and passion of fado. It also strengthens the argument that the music originated with sailors a long way from home, missing their families, and living in conditions of varying degrees of deprivation.
The rather archaic-looking Portuguese guitar helps to give fado its unique sound. Strung like a mandolin, with the body of a lute, but with a tuning system that has nothing to do with the pegs we associate with any modern instrument, its range is more limited. But the sound it produces seems ideally suited to the requirements of fado and it works in tandem with the singer's voice to enrich the melody of the song.
One can't talk about fado in the 20th century without talking about Amalia Rodrigues, the queen of fado music from her earliest public performances in the 1930s to her death in 1999. EFOR films has produced a 65-minute documentary on DVD called Amalia Rodrigues: The Spirit Of Fado, which not only traces her career but serves as a primer to introduce this unique music of Portugal to those who have not experienced it yet.
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