Grândola, Vila Morena

At twenty past midnight on 25 April 1974, Rádio Renascença played "Grândola, Vila Morena", and none of the radio hosts knew what it meant. For the officers of the Armed Forces Movement it was the second signal: their coup against the Estado Novo dictatorship was under way. The planner Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho had first wanted another José Afonso song, "Venham Mais Cinco", but was talked out of it because that one was banned and would raise suspicion. "Grândola" was not on the censors' list. By morning troops held strategic points across the country, and the Carnation Revolution had begun. Afonso had written it a decade earlier, inspired by a 1964 concert at a working-class musical society in Grândola, a town in the Alentejo, composing words and melody while driving home. It sings of the fraternity of the town's people in the style of cante alentejano, unaccompanied, each verse sung solo and then answered by a choir. He recorded it in France in October 1971 with producer José Mário Branco. The footsteps that keep time were recorded at 3 a.m. on a gravel path outside the studio, to avoid the noise of passing cars. A month before the coup, Afonso closed a Lisbon concert with it while censors' agents took notes, and the audience joined in on the line about the people being in command. It is still sung every 25 April, and Portuguese protesters, including a gallery that interrupted the prime minister in parliament in 2013, keep reaching for it.