Sodade

Sodade was already decades old when Cesária Évora made it famous. Armando Zeferino Soares wrote it in the 1950s, and its title is the Cape Verdean Creole form of the Portuguese saudade, that untranslatable longing for someone or somewhere far away. The song refers to a specific departure: the Cape Verdeans sent as contract labourers to the plantations of São Tomé under António de Oliveira Salazar's dictatorship. Its refrain keeps asking who showed the traveller the road that leads so far from home. It grew out of a long tradition. For more than two centuries Cape Verdeans have left the islands, first as whalers recruited to New England, later during droughts and after independence, and departures were often marked with a morna sung as a farewell serenade. That history is why morna lyrics so often sound melancholy, and Sodade distils it. The Angolan singer Bonga recorded it in 1974 on Angola 74, but it was Évora's version on her 1992 album Miss Perfumado that carried it around the world. Its success brought a long dispute over who had written it. The duo Amândio Cabral and Luís Morais contested the authorship until a court ruled in December 2006 that Soares was the author. The song kept travelling: Dulce Pontes sang it with Kepa Junkera, and Madonna performed it on her Madame X tour, joined in Lisbon by the Cape Verdean singer Dino d'Santiago. A farewell written for emigrant workers became the song through which much of the world first heard Cape Verde.