Word: fadista
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Dates: during 1964-1964
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...fact, a kind of savior. When she became a fadista in the late '30s, the fados were in bad flower because of their unpleasant exaltation of poverty, disease and death. Amália, reeking of pathos, rescued the art of the fado by lifting its emotional sights to the level of pain, nostalgia and despair. Such suffering is delicious to the Portuguese, and the fados cover everything-defeated souls, wasted nights, strange shadows. Americans who have a feeling for the blues can understand the spirit of the fado, but you ain't really been blue till...
...Bullfights. Fados sound like torch songs sung from the top of a mosque: sobs, wails, cries from the soul. Even when performed by as dulcet a fadista as Amália, they are more forlorn than a foghorn, more despairing than a moan. Fado means destiny in Portuguese, and the Weltschmerz of a good fado gets a physical grip on its audience; like "ffillie Holiday's blues, fados encourage a state of mind well beyond the reach of popular music...
Some scholars hear in fados "the sweet crying" of African slave songs or Gregorian chants. By the 18th century, Portuguese sailors were singing the sad songs to prostitutes, who sang them to aristocrats and other opinion makers. The first great fadista was Maria Severa, a gypsy prostitute who sang in a low-life casa do fado in the 1830s. She devoted her 26 dissolute years to bed and bullfights, wine and fado, and her legend is so much with the Portuguese that fadistas still wear black shawls in mourning...
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