Ten tracks to understand fado

Nunca é silêncio vão (Fado Pedro Rodrigues), sung by Carminho in 2009. Amar Não É Pecado (Fado Pedro Rodrigues), sung by Sara Paixão in 2024. Look at the brackets.

Different songs, different voices, fifteen years apart, and the same thing sitting inside the brackets on both, because that bracket is the one piece of information an outsider never gets handed and it names the tune the words are resting on.

In this music the words and the tune have separate histories. Often separate authors too.

One census of Lisbon’s traditional tunes counts at least a hundred and eighty of them. They’re common stock. Anyone can pick one up and write new words for it, and people have been doing exactly that for as long as there have been fado houses to do it in.

Ten tracks below. They run from the tunes nobody owns to the ones with somebody’s name inside them.

The three oldest, which belong to no one

Amália Rodrigues, Fado Menor. Two chords, minor key. It’s the easiest of the lot to play, which is why it tends to be the first one anybody learns, and why you’ll hear it come round again and again once you know what you’re listening for.

Amália Rodrigues, Fado corrido. Two minutes and ten seconds, major key, quick. Together with the Menor and the Mouraria it makes up the triad every fado singer is expected to know cold. Then it’s gone.

Arménio de Melo, Fado Mouraria. This is the one they use for the desgarrada, the sung duel where two singers answer each other line by line until one of them runs out of things to say.

It works for that because the frame underneath is simple enough to improvise over all night.

Listen while you read

The ones with a date and a recording

José Porfírio, Fado Vitória. It sits in a collection of sides cut in Lisbon between 1928 and 1936, which is the decade when fado came off the tavern floor and onto shellac, and the shared repertoire went onto shellac with it. Nobody signed the tune.

Ercília Costa with Armandinho, Fado Tango. From a set of Portuguese fados recorded in 1930. Two names on the label. A voice and a guitarra, and neither of them wrote what they’re playing.

The guitarra portuguesa you can hear behind her is what UNESCO calls a pear-shaped cittern with twelve wire strings, unique to Portugal.

The ones carrying a maker’s name

Alfredo Marceneiro, Fado Laranjeira. He worked as a joiner, which is where the stage name comes from, and he’s the only singer in this list performing a tune of his own rather than one he found lying about. The Lisbon museum lists a good number of them under his name.

We put the Laranjeira on twenty-odd times before it stopped sounding like a finished song and started sounding like a tune anyone could borrow.

Manuel de Almeida, Fado Bailado. Marceneiro’s again, sung here by somebody else entirely. That’s the normal case. One person writes the tune, and everybody else lays their own words across it for the next fifty years without anybody thinking that odd.

The proof, twice in a row

Carminho, Nunca é silêncio vão. 2009.

Sara Paixão, Amar Não É Pecado. 2024.

The same tune declared on both sleeves, under two lyrics that have nothing whatever to do with each other. We played them back to back and for a second we thought something had gone wrong in the catalogue.

When somebody stops drawing on the common stock

Amália Rodrigues, Asas fechadas. From 1962, and it’s the record that closes this ladder.

Alain Oulman, a composer born just outside Lisbon to French parents, introduced himself to her by showing her a poem. Vagamundo, by Luís de Macedo. It’s the ninth track here.

Oulman wrote new music for poems that had already been chosen, and he put it plainly in a 1971 interview: the music comes after the poem, never the other way round. Twenty-two of his compositions ended up across eight of her albums.

So from there on a fado can have a tune that belongs to one person and to nobody else, which had not been true of the form before. The other hundred and eighty are still sitting where they were. Anybody can still help themselves.