This is a re-edited version of a piece Banning Eyre wrote for Rhythm in 1995. 

A photograph of Cape Verdean diva Cesaria Èvora shows the 54-year-old singer standing in the midst of a grand, forbidding landscape. Around her, tawny sand stretches towards a haphazard wall of irregular, gray-brown boulders. Behind the wall are two buildings, constructed largely from broken stones. The nearer one looks abandoned, its windows and door removed; the further one, painted white, looks fortress-like with low ceilings, a chimney and very small windows. Beyond, dark, crumbling, volcanic mountains rise with steep, jagged faces and long talus fields sloping down toward the sand. In this vast, stony tableau, the only visible plant life is one forlorn-looking palm tree, its trunk leaning and its fronds skewed to one side, as if from constant exposure to a strong, single-minded wind. Cesaria stands in the foreground, her round figure filling out a loose-fitting, dark blue frock, her black hair pulled back tightly, and her coppery, meztiso skin shining against the muted landscape. She appears to look up, her mouth open in a half smile, strangely at odds with her sad, sleepy eyes--narrow canyons receding within the full moon of her face.

The scene is Salamansa, a beach not far from Cesaria's home on the Cape Verdean island of Sào Vicente. And if its barrenness conveys an arresting beauty and even a certain warmth, that contradiction says much about Cesaria's artistic medium, the melancholy Cape Verdean morna. Mornas--their name taken from the English verb to mourn--tell amazing stories from this remote archipelago of ten islands some 350 miles west of the Senegalese coast. Uninhabited when the Portuguese began haunting them in 1456, the Cape Verde islands went on to see one of the cruelest sides of the African slave trade, as West Africans were imprisoned there before crossing the Atlantic to unimagined fates. Forced to intermarry with Portuguese, the Africans who remained in Cape Verde labored to build stone roads and dwellings, and to work plantations, all but doomed in the hostile, dry climate. Though its name suggests green bounty, the archipelago suffered three long droughts during the 18th and 19th centuries--each time, over 40% of the population starved to death--and there were more deadly dry spells during this century. Even now, a time when sparse rains have returned and new techniques are reviving flora on some islands, farming is next to impossible. On one island, it did not rain for over ten years.

Cesaria sings an old morna about Salamansa on her new album, and she says it's still one of her favorites. "When we were young, we used to go there with our lovers," she told me over the phone from Paris, where she now visits regularly. "At that beach the sand is very fine, and the song talks about rolling in the sands of Salamansa." That sweet memory of a lost moment of happiness shining out from the dreariness of the past expresses the morna perfectly. Cesaria's deep voice--at once frail and husky, weary and indomitable--quivers and moans mellifluously amid the light, bobbing melodies of a violin, an acoustic guitar and the chiming, paired-string Portuguese cavanquilo. Cesaria's delivery of a morna speaks to the heart of despair, and reveals a love that refuses to die. Her ability to communicate these gnarled passions without the aid of translations has made her something of a world music star in recent years. But however much Cesaria touches foreign listeners, she grasps the heartstrings of Cape Verdeans all the more firmly.

Today, about two-thirds of the world's one million Cape Verdeans live abroad, with the largest communities in Lisbon and New England, where islanders first escaped after being recruited into wailing ship crews in the early 19th century. Many expatriates maintain ties with their 300,000 relatives in Cape Verde, even though they may never have visited there. Surprisingly though, Cape Verdeans around the world never really heard the greatest living master of the morna until Cesaria made her first record in 1987. Recordings of more dance-oriented Cape Verdean styles, like the coladeira--originally, a fast take on the morna--and the funana with its rebellious lyrics and African rhythm, did circulate. But all the while, Cesaria languished on Sào Vicente, particularly after Cape Verde achieved independence in 1975 and a socialist government cracked down on the sort of patronage from the wealthy that had been her lifeblood during colonial times. For the next ten years, she barely sang. Then, in 1985, a Cape Verdean women's organization asked her to record two songs for a compilation CD. She went to Paris to record, and while there, she played some concerts. Her abundant talent visible at last, she soon became Cape Verde's most celebrated singer. Since then, she has produced four acclaimed releases, most notably her 1992 Miss Perfumado, widely considered a masterpiece and the model for all recordings of the morna since.

Though recognition came late for Cesaria, she did expect it. "It wasn't really a dream," she told me. "It was just a feeling that one day I would be successful." Cesaria's violinist father died when she was just 7. She told the French magazine Actuel that her grandmother recalls her sitting on her father's lap, singing while he played. Cesaria doesn't remember this, but she does remember her influential composer uncle, Francisco Xavier de Cruz, better known as B. Leza, a play on the Portuguese word for beauty, "beleza." Leza enriched his mornas with complex harmonies and wrote some of the form's most durable titles. Most of Cesaria's albums include renditions of his work. Surrounded by music, Cesaria grew up singing. She idolized Mahalia Jackson, Billie Holliday and Amalia Rodriguez, the greatest exponent of the Portuguese fado.

"I started singing in the neighborhood where I lived, just with my friends," she told me. "It was in the suburbs of Mindelo [capital of Sào Vicente and reportedly Cape Verde's liveliest city]. It was just to amuse ourselves. When I was 16, a boyfriend who played the guitar discovered that I could sing. It was really thanks to him that I started singing professionally. Later, I recorded for the national radio. And when they started to play that recording, people discovered who I was. Then bars and restaurants invited me to perform. Sometimes, wealthy Portuguese asked me to come and sing for them."

Cesaria has described herself as a product of colonial times. She concedes that life is much better for her nowadays, but she doesn't think things have changed appreciably for her countrymen, and she doesn't give the government much credit for her recent good fortunes. As she told Actuel, "The Portuguese paid me. They gave me food, potatoes, cod fish and cigarettes. I didn't have many problems with the colonists. Today, the new government has promised to give me a house. But there are jealousies in the artistic community. I can live in this house, but then it will be another artist's turn. They call that an `artist's house.' But I won't leave. I will stay in this house until tea becomes coffee."

Notoriously aloof in interviews, Cesaria can unleash the occasional zinger, especially when probed on her three terminated marriages. In a striking departure from the romanticism of her mornas, she told Télérama in 1992, "I refuse to let a man under my roof. I prefer to cut off problems at the root." In another interview, she said, "I never had a chance with the fathers of my children. I assume the roles of the father and the mother." To me, she simply said, "I am married to my mother [with whom she still lives], my children [a 35-year-old son and a 27-year-old daughter], and their two children."

Utterly allergic to pretentiousness and self-hype, she recently told public radio's, Afropop Worldwide, "Cesaria is a simple woman, without vanity, without anything, normal, as if I wasn't a singer." Pressed about her renowned fondness for whiskey, she went on to shrug off the notion that drinking might harm her voice. "I've had plenty of time to ruin my voice. And since it's not ruined yet, I'm going to continue."

Buffeted by trials and tragedies, Cesaria seems made for the morna. Performing with closed eyes and bare feet, which she calls part of the "national costume" of Cape Verde, Cesaria says that memories play in her head as she sings, transporting her to another time and place. Her brilliance as an interpreter of the great mornas guarantees her a place in Cape Verdean hearts, but her success beyond those circles has to do with shrewd choices made by her producer, José da Silva, head of Paris-based Lusafrica, and her arranger Paulino Vieira, a Cape Verdean multi-instrumentalist living in Lisbon. "When I first came to Paris," Cesaria told me, "I recorded electric. But afterwards, we found that the acoustic music did the best. So we've stayed with acoustic ever since."

On the line to translate between Cesaria's Cape Verdean Creole and my French, da Silva interjected here. "In Cape Verde, the scene is electric. If it's not electric, people won't buy it. That was certainly true in 1987. Acoustic music was commonplace. You could hear it on any streetcorner. The thing that was special was the records that came with keyboards and synthesizers and all that. As her producer, I assumed that we had to record electric since we were making records to sell to the Cape Verdeans. But even then, we did things half and half--half electric and half acoustic. We always did the mornas acoustic and the colodeiras electric for the people dancing in the bars. We made two records like that. But then I saw the reaction in France. People liked the acoustic tracks much better. So for the third album, we decided to make it all acoustic. And that was the record that created the real success, Miss Perfumado."

Leading off with Cesaria's most popular morna to date, the achingly beautiful "Sodade," Miss Perfumado shimmers throughout. The strings and accordions mingle deliciously around Cesaria's sublimely relaxed voice. Da Silva credits arranger Vieira for the record's winning sound. "Paulino Vieira is rather a genius of Cape Verdean music. He learned to play from Salesian priests in Cape Verde, and now he plays everything. Once we understood what people wanted from Cape Verdean music, we asked him to arrange Cesaria's album as roots as possible. I think he's about the only person in Cape Verde who was capable of researching and reproducing the way music was played in the past. He looked into how people played the guitar before so he could get the same sound."

Da Silva says that Cape Verdean audiences at first rejected the all acoustic sound. "But after the success in Europe," he adds, "the popularization of the morna, then people started to buy it. Now other artists wants to record acoustic. Her success created a crisis of conscience. The people became convinced that their music was good. In the past, people didn't value the morna so much. They thought they had to add synthesizers and make modern music." The new Cesaria (1995), her first release to be distributed in the US on Nonesuch, assembles most of the same team that created Miss Perfumado and achieves essentially the same magical effect. One standout track, "Consedjo," is a coladeira written by Ramiro Mendes of MB records, a Cape Verdean label based in Brockton, Massachusetts. In this animated lament, a harmonica skillfully shadows Cesaria's voice as she dispenses advice to her children on how to avoid the mistakes she made in life, most notably, "Don't hesitate/Regrets always come later."

In the buzz that has developed over the morna, various attributions as to its origin have surfaced. It began in the 18th century, according to many, influenced by the fado and the Brazilian mugina. Writers have also sought to make a spiritual connection with American blues. Cesaria has been known to reject these comparisons. To me, she said, "I don't find that the morna has anything in common with the fado. I accept more the comparison with blues. I think that has to do with the way people live in Cape Verde--the suffering we've experienced is close to [the suffering that inspired] the blues."

After a half-century in Cape Verde, Cesaria now enjoys the work of touring and building an international career--interviews aside. Paris now feels like a second home to her and she's seen many of the great concert halls of Europe. This fall, she looks forward to her first US tour. "I had to leave Cape Verde to discover the world," Cesaria says simply. Through her, much of the world is now discovering Cape Verde--its sinister history, its survivor's spirit, and the sands and boulders of Salamansa.

First published: Rhythm