Cesária Évora
1941 – 2011 · Cape Verde
Known for: The barefoot diva of morna, who carried Cape Verdean song to the world
“She sang of home barefoot, and the world listened.”
Biography
Cesária Évora was born in Mindelo on the island of São Vicente on 27 August 1941, one of seven children in a colony where poverty was the ordinary condition. Her father, a violinist, died while she was small, and her mother, a cook and a maid, could not keep the family together; Évora was raised by her grandmother and placed in an orphanage at the age of ten. Formal schooling barely touched her. At sixteen she began singing morna and coladeira in the bars of Mindelo, encouraged by a guitarist she had fallen in love with, and the port city, with its sailors and its late night cafés, gave her somewhere to sing. She became the headline act at the Café Royal and reached the rest of Cape Verde through Radio Mindelo.
For a woman in Cape Verde, singing was not considered a respectable living, and Évora was judged for her colour and her class as well. She toured with the musician Luís Morais, recorded for radio in the 1960s and released two singles, but the money never followed. Divorced three times, raising her children alone, drinking and unwell, she gave up music in the 1970s and moved back in with her mother, while admirers in Mindelo collected funds to keep her. She called that decade her dark years. In 1985 the Organisation of Cape Verdean Women asked her to record for an anthology in Portugal, and while singing at a Lisbon restaurant in 1987 she was heard by the producer José da Silva, who took her to Paris. La Diva Aux Pieds Nus appeared in 1988, and she sang on it, then as always, barefoot.
Mar Azul found an audience in 1991, and Miss Perfumado sold hundreds of thousands of copies in 1992 and filled the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris. Évora was past fifty and touring the world, singing in Cape Verdean Creole about love, departure and longing for home to audiences who understood not a word of it. The album Cesaria Evora brought her a first Grammy nomination in 1995, and Voz d'Amor won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary World Music Album in 2004. Cape Verde made her a cultural ambassador and gave her a diplomatic passport, Portugal awarded her the Grand Cross of the Order of Prince Henry and France the Legion of Honour. Her heart failed her by degrees: a stroke on tour in Australia in 2008, a heart attack and surgery in 2010, retirement in September 2011. Cesária Évora died in Mindelo on 17 December 2011, aged seventy, and was buried in the town where she had first begun to sing.