Amália Rodrigues
1920 – 1999 · Portugal
Known for: The queen of fado
“Her voice gave saudade a sound the whole world could recognise.”
Biography
Amália Rodrigues was born on 23 July 1920 in Pena, a parish of Lisbon, into a family that had come to the capital from the Castelo Branco district in the interior; she herself always maintained that her real birthday was the first of July. She grew up poor and took whatever work she could find, including selling fruit on the Lisbon quays. She began singing around 1935, when fado was still the music of the city's taverns and their people, and her first professional engagement in a fado house came in 1939. The composer Frederico Valério recognised what her voice could carry and wrote a series of melodies for her, among them Ai Mouraria and Que Deus Me Perdoe. By the early 1940s she was famous throughout Portugal.
What Rodrigues made of fado reached far beyond the tavern. She first sang abroad in 1943, made her first recordings in Brazil in 1945, and in 1950, at international benefit concerts, gave the song Coimbra to audiences who would come to know it as April in Portugal. In 1953 she became the first Portuguese artist to appear on American television, and from 1956 she returned to the Olympia in Paris for ten seasons spread over more than thirty years. Her work with the composer Alain Oulman from 1962 changed the music itself: poems by Camões, David Mourão-Ferreira and Pedro Homem de Mello, and her own verses, became fados, and out of that partnership came the songs that are inseparable from her, Povo Que Lavas no Rio, Maria Lisboa, Abandono and Estranha Forma de Vida. She acted as well, and won Portugal's award for best film actress for Fado in 1947 and a second time in 1965.
The years after the revolution of 25 April 1974 were bitter. Rodrigues, who had quietly given money to the Portuguese Communist Party while Salazar governed, was publicly and falsely accused of having worked for the political police, and the charge brought on a severe depression. The accusation faded, her audiences did not, and from the 1970s she was received with particular warmth in Italy and Japan. She died in Lisbon on 6 October 1999 and the country stopped: three days of national mourning were declared, and in 2001 her remains were carried to the National Pantheon, an honour Portugal grants to very few. She remains the best selling Portuguese recording artist, and the music she carried out of the taverns was inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage in 2011.