1 

Fado – what’s in a name?

Fado is a predominantly vocal Portuguese musical form first documented in the late 1830s,
virtually always accompanied by plucked string instruments, predominantly associated with
the urban lower classes, and which reached the recording industry during the last decade of
the 19th century. 1 It had reached what might perhaps be termed a classic form (“fado castiço”
in Portuguese terminology), by the late 1920s. It has continued to flourish to this day and has
become virtually the only internationally known form of Portuguese music. It exists both as a
living urban folk tradition, a tourist attraction, and a national and nationalist emblem, not least
since it was included in 2011 among the (at present 427) items in the UNESCO ”Intangible
Cultural Heritage of Humanity”, an inclusion which is gladly appended to the front covers of
many CD issues and which turns up as an advert link at the top or bottom of any Google
search page on fado. The singer(s) is/are usually accompanied by one or two Portuguese
guitars, a Spanish guitar, usually with metal strings, and often, since circa 1949, a four-
stringed acoustic bass guitar. The lyrics may follow various formal poetic traditions and are
often credited to specific authors, some whom may be well-known poets. The melodic and
harmonic formulae are of both anonymous and specifically credited authorship, some of them
well-documented with a classic AABB form, and characteristic rhythmic cells, as early as the
1840s/1850s. Many different songs may be based on these (to aficionados) well-known
formulae, perhaps in the same manner as many people will immediately identify thousands of
songs as 12-bar blues, or perhaps as for example “Summertime” may be played in an infinity
of guises which are all identifiable as “Summertime”. The subject-matter of fado covers
themes many of which are familiar in other urban genres such as rebetika and tango; there are
certain perhaps characteristic themes such as various forms of love, prostitution, the spiritual
nobility and heroism of the poor in the face of rich nobility, drink, orphans, and not least, self-
reflexively, the very act of singing fado as a channel of cathartic release and comfort during
life’s troubles, and likewise the emotional significance for the singer of the guitarra
portuguesa, always simply referred to as the guitarra, while the “Spanish” guitar is called
“viola” (violão in Brazil). Saudade – a Portuguese word for a certain synthesis of melancholy
and nostalgia – is an essential component. Fado lyrics were early subject to censorship during
the long-lived Salazar dictatorship, although, as befits a male chauvinist society, prostitution
was not a forbidden subject, as it was however in Metaxas’ Greece in 1936. Fado lyrics with
the censors’ pass or fail stamps have survived in numbers; musicians and singers were obliged
to apply for licences to perform in public.

The medial success of Amália Rodrigues (1920-1999) is largely responsible for fado’s
presence outside the Portuguese-speaking world. This success is in this writer’s opinion a
two-edged sword, as the particular character of her delivery has become paradigmatic. This
assertion will be developed later in this essay.

So, again, what is fado?

As far as I have been able to understand, although the word itself exists in the Portuguese
language as the word for fate, there is still no consensus as to the origin of the word as applied
                                                            
1
  My friend Pedro Jorge informs me that the famous Augusto Hilário (1864-1896) made a few (commercial?)
recordings, and that he has seen adverts for (locally produced?) cylinders that included Reinaldo Varela, from as
early as 1899. The first major attempt to target the market at large was as far as he knows made by E. Berliner's
Gramophone with Darby and Gaisberg's recordings from late 1900.

 
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to this music, nor as to the origin the music identified by that name. There are theories which
suggest its origin in various Brazilian dance and song forms such as modinha, and lundum,
phenomena which may have been brought back to Portugal from Brazil and were perceived as
more or less lascivious by the Portuguese bourgeoisie and nobility. There are also theories of
Moorish and African influence, whose value may be seriously questioned today, while there
are certainly incontrovertible traces of rural Portuguese folk music. The word fado as applied
to the musical form may in fact have been transferred from the word fadista rather than the
reverse process. Descriptions of fadistas are strikingly similar to 19th and early 20th century
descriptions of rebetes, manges, koutsavakidhes, and daïdes in Greece, whose emblematic
traits were a certain style of dressing, the habitual carrying of, and use of, knives, and a life-
style seen by established society as antisocial. This theme was astutely noted by João Dos
Santos in his article on fado in Musical Traditions (No 7, mid-1987, MT079) 30 years ago.

What does seem clear is that fado as we know it originated in Lisbon the early decades of the
19th century and that it was always sung to the accompaniment of a Portuguese guitar, in the
beginning often played by the singer her/himself and probably with simple strummed chords.
At some time towards the middle or end of the 19th century, it would appear, the use of a
wire-strung or gut-strung guitar of Spanish build as an accompanying instrument was
introduced. Sometimes a guitar with extra bass strings was used, and from 1949, the acoustic
bass guitar became a relatively common member of the ensemble, very often played by the
seemingly indestructible nonagenarian Joel Pina, 97 this year and apparently going strong.
Fado was associated with the urban lower classes, although its first iconic figure the fado
singer and prostitute Maria Severa Onofriana (aka “A Severa”) (1820-1846) had a famed
relationship with a nobleman, the 13th count of Vimioso, and a certain number of prominent
fado singers of both sexes have come from a background in the nobility.

The Portuguese guitar – guitarra portuguesa

This twelve-stringed instrument, which looks like a huge flat-back mandolin but isn’t, is 
strung with three octave pairs and three unison pairs, tuned today in the peculiar (to non-
Portuguese musicians) so-called fado tuning, from bass upwards DABeab. This is in essence a
tuning in fifths (DAeb) with the note b doubled in the bass and the note a doubled in the
treble, which gives a major second between two of the pairs. The instrument was originally
commonly tuned, as was the 18th century instrument known as the English guitar or “guittar”,
to a C major chord (CEGceg) 2 . This was the so-called “natural tuning”, afinação natural in
Portuguese, and so named in a tutor published in 1875 3 , where two further tunings are given.
A tuning with the fifth course raised by a whole tone, thus giving the interval of a fourth
between the 6th and 5th courses, was called afinação natural com 4. The tuning now virtually
standard, given at the beginning of this paragraph, was called afinação do fado corrido. What
is unknown to most people outside Portugal, and also to most inside Portugal who are not
particularly interested, is that the instrument which has become synonymous with fado has a
history which can be traced to the cittern of renaissance Europe, and later to other cittern-like
instruments of 18th century European praxis. The Portuguese guitar is plucked with thumb
and index fingers, either with natural nails or with a particular kind of tortoiseshell or plastic
fingerpick unique to Portuguese guitar technique. Though such fingerpicks were noted as
                                                            
2
According to Pedro Jorge there are manuscripts in Coimbra probably dating from the first half of the 18th
century, allegedly written for fado tuning; Pedro hasn’t actually had the chance to see them yet. The first
(anonymous) method published in 1875 (not to be confused with Maia's method from the same year mentioned
in the note below) mentions the fado tuning as the most popular tuning.
3
A.F. Maia & D.L. Vieira - Apontamentos para um Méthodo de guitarra (Lisbon, Lallemant Frères, 1875).
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early as 1875, they probably began to become the norm in the 1920s and 1930s, when
musicians needed to be sure of attaining volume in public performance situations and
recording studios. Armandinho (see later) is however known to have eschewed fingerpicks,
and to have always played with nails. All the fast passage work and tremolo is, (to an outsider
quite incredibly), played with up and down strokes of the index finger, a technique which was
described in original sources of 16th century vihuela technique under the name of
dedilho/dedillo, but which appears to have been virtually forgotten until the development of
Portuguese guitar technique. This technique doesn’t have a specific name current among
Portuguese musicians in general, but Pedro Caldeira Cabral has chosen to use the renaissance
term dedilho in his writings.

There is a commonly held belief that the Portuguese guitar is simply a "Portuguesified" form
of the English guitar, itself also a descendant of the cittern family, which was imported to
Portugal through the trade connections of the port wine business. This is only partly true.
What is true is that forms of this 18th century instrument lived a parallel existence among the
Portuguese bourgeoisie and nobility during much of the 19th century and some few decades
into the 20th century, under the name of citara. Pedro Caldeira Cabral, (1950-) who has a huge
collection of such instruments, has written a large illustrated book on this subject,
unfortunately not translated to English. Cabral is unusual in that he is a musician, an
instrument maker and repairer, and a multi-instrumentalist who is at home at a deep level both
within the fado tradition and in the worlds of “early music” and “classical music”.
Unfortunately, most other published information on the subject tends to confuse the matter by
not pointing out that a lot of musical activity involving instruments of the Portuguese guitar
family has not really been “fado” at all.

If one listens to vocal fado recordings from the beginning of the last century one hears that
virtuosic guitarra accompaniment is not the norm. The guitarra virtuosi who recorded early on
recorded a kind of music which is rather to be understood as a form of middle class virtuoso
"hausmusik". Some of them were incredible virtuosi, but their recordings are sparse, hardly
ever reissued, and virtually unknown to today's fado audience. Their titles often, but by no
means always, included the work fado. In terms of pure technical ability some of these
musicians were technically at least on a par with Armandinho (Armando Augusto Freire,
1891-1946). Through his virtuosity, his improvisational and compositional gift, and later,
through his ability to manage singers and the musical running of fado houses, Armandinho
played a central role in the development of the fado genre from about the age of 20 until his
death from tuberculosis in December 1946. In spite of all this Armandinho, who came from a
poor background, remained relatively poor until the end of his life. I think it's fair to say that
when he accompanied singers (which he did quite a bit on record) his playing, although often
manifestly of virtuoso calibre, never disturbed or overshadowed the quality of the singers or
the dynamics of the songs. It was when he recorded solos that he would in a number of cases
give freer rein to his virtuosity, which I would insist is never employed as a narcissistically
demonstrative end in itself. I suspect that the inspiration which emanated from Armandinho's
playing, and which strongly influenced Jaime Santos, José Nunes, and several other
prominent guitarists of the later generation, some of whom played beside Armandinho in their
youth, and whose own heydays were from the late 1940s to the 1970s, has led to the current
paradigm where a singer is expected to be accompanied by a manifestly virtuosic Portuguese
guitarist. This is a quite different situation from fado in its beginnings. What’s more, those
elements of virtuosity in Armandinho’s accompaniments of vocalists are always clearly
integral to the melodic structure of the composition, whereas today one is far too often treated
to instrumental fill-ins which are in fact nothing more than unimaginative sequences of notes,
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often just scale passages devoid of musical tension, but perhaps full of demonstrated digital
(as in fingers) Olympic-level gymnastics, more symptomatic of horror vacui, of musical
narcissism, and of the compulsory presence of the guitarra portuguesa as a passport to
fadoland, than of genuine musical intentionality.

The development of fado during the age of recording – a personal view

When I studied art history in the 1960s I was caught by the ideas expressed in Heinrich
Wölfflin's writing on Italian painting, when he described the progressive arch-formed
metamorphosis over time of an art form from archaic to classic to baroque to mannerist to
rococo. It's a model which can be applied to many musical forms other than so-called
"classical" music - from the archaic/classical work of Blind Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson,
Robert Johnson, through the classical-baroque of Chicago blues to the baroque-mannerism of
Eric Clapton & co to the mannerist and rococo quantitavisms of hard rock and its metallic
progeny....or from the archaisms of early 20th century rebetika through the classic forms of
1930s-1940s rebetika to the quantitavism spawned by imitators of the playful virtuosity of the
bouzouki and guitar virtuoso, singer and composer Manolis Hiotis, who sparkled simply
because he could have effortless fun doing it, not because he was out to impress (in my
humble opinion) - a similar example being Jimi Hendrix. I would assert that Wölfflin’s
model can be applied to fado, although the process has followed somewhat different paths
from blues and rebetika. The transition from classicism to mannerism in vocal delivery is
certainly noticeable in contemporary fado recordings, for those who have listened to Amália
Rodrigues 4 .

For the non-Portuguese speaker, the richness of fado themes in the older repertory is evident
in the translations of songs sung by among others Alfredo Marceneiro, Frutuosa França and
Amália Rodrigues, included in the English version of what is perhaps the best available
introduction to fado – the catalogue of a 1994 Lisbon fado exhibition entitled “Fado – Voices
and Shadows” (Fado – Vozes e Sombras). Unfortunately translations of lyrics are largely
absent from fado records made for international consumption; I have in fact yet to see an
example. The singer Claudia Aurora, who based herself in England in 2003, around the time
of the initiation of her fado career, asserts that people don’t understand what she is singing but
that they get the feeling. To her credit, the digital release page of her latest CD includes the
lyrics, but in Portuguese only. A perusal of a few of these lyrics with the help of Google
translate offered me the opportunity to compare them to the lyrics reproduced in “Fado –
Voices and Shadows”. I found a paradigmatic difference. Aurora’s lyrics are personal poetic
effusions (no literary evaluation intended) marked by the ubiquity of the first person pronoun
in the forms “I”, “me”, “my”, at least one of which occurs on almost every line. These
pronouns are virtually absent from all but a couple of the lyrics included in “Fado – Voices
and Shadows”, which are nearly all stories about a person or persons other than the singer.
Thus, much of today’s fado has been subsumed into the international category of “singer-
songwriters”, and, within that category, to the belly-button fixated crowd.

I first listened to fado over 40 years ago, when a friend lent me two Columbia LPs - the 1964
LP “Há Festa Na Mouraria” (CSX24), by Alfredo Marceneiro (1888 or 1891-1982), and the
                                                            
4
It is undeniable that the observations I discuss here apply virtually exclusively to female singers. This in itself
opens up a huge and important territory which I will leave unexplored in this essay. The question which I will
leave hanging in the air being: are there things to be understood here through fado’s current forms and styles of
expression, which tell us things about the relation between women and men in Portuguese society, and about the
ongoing processes of emancipation of women (and men?)
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Amália Rodrigues LP “Fado Português (SCX 6233) from 1967. The Marceneiro LP was his
second recording in LP format, despite an unbroken artistic career which had begun in his late
teens. It was the singing tone of the Portuguese guitar, especially on Marceneiro's disc, which
particularly caught my ear during that first meeting with fado – a tonal ideal which had an
effect which has persisted in my Greek bouzouki playing until this day. I didn't experience the
players of the Portuguese guitar on those records as patently or demonstratively virtuosic, or
unnecessarily fast - just very musical. I liked Marceneiro's voice and singing more than
Amália's, (I appreciate them both more today than then, but still prefer Alfredo) but of course
I didn't understand a word either of them sang. Marceneiro didn’t like making recordings – in
fact the notes to his first LP recorded in 1960 assert that he blindfolded himself in order to
tolerate the studio situation!

Then I hardly listened to fado for a couple of decades, until my first visit to Portugal in 1991.
During that trip we were lucky to hear fairly good not too touristy fado in a couple of places,
and I heard one lady singer in particular who moved me very deeply (Julieta Reis, not one of
the "famous" ones). I bought a few LPs “on spec” which led to me discovering the Coimbra
style (through Carlos Paredes’ LPs) a style distinct from the Lisbon style, both socially,
instrumentally, and I later found, vocally.

In 1989 Bruce Bastin’s Interstate Music Heritage label published the LP and CD “Portuguese
String Music” (HT323/HT CD 05) curated by Dick Spottswood and beautifully remastered by
Jack Towers (1914-2010). Eight of the sixteen 78 rpm sides are Portuguese guitar
instrumentals originally recorded between 1922 and 1928. Between 1992 and 1996 the first
larger-scale attempt to reissue fado recordings from the 78 rpm era resulted in six CDs on the
same label. These six CDs, curated by Paul Vernon, contained fado recordings from the 1920s
to the 1940s accessed from the Gallop collection, the National Music Archive and the EMI
archives. The first two, Fado de Lisboa 1928-1936 and Fado de Coimbra 1926-1930 (HT CD
14 & 15) appear to have been produced before the label had begun to employ CEDAR
technology, and they retain essential upper frequency sound, with noticeable but perfectly
tolerable surface noise. The subsequent four – Lisbon Women (HT CD 24), Armandinho -
The 1928-29 HMV sessions (HT CD 25), António Menano (HT CD 31) and Ercilia Costa
with Armandinho, (HT CD 32) are, despite their excellent musical content, significantly
marred by over-ambitious remastering. I’m not sure if Charlie Crump, the engineer
responsible, used CEDAR technology, but whichever technology he used he managed to
embed all the music in cotton wool. With this unfriendly comment I certainly do not wish to
imply that such technologies cannot be used to give very satisfying musical results, and would
here like to refer the interested reader to a text of mine available on this site here:

http://www.mustrad.org.uk/pdf/78s.pdf

A diversion – Armandinho again

As Armandinho was not only a great musician, but can perhaps also be held responsible for
the still current paradigm for accompanying vocal fado, I will indulge the reader in some
further ruminations. The major impression the Heritage CDs made on me at the time (I have
listened to all of them) was made by his instrumentals. Misnamed by Paul Vernon as
“Salgado Armando Freire”, Armandinho’s real name, once and for all, was Armando Augusto
Freire, no more and no less. Paul also made the mistake of confusing Salvador Freire, a lesser
but excellent player, with Armandinho himself. Both these misunderstandings have "gone
viral" and have led such putatively serious institutions as the Museu do Fado and the
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Portuguese record label Tradisom to persist in repeating the misnomer, and to perpetuate the
inaccurate notion that Armandinho made his first solo recordings in 1926. This is despite
several attempts by yours truly to enlighten those responsible. Armandinho’s first solo
sessions were in reality, until other reliable information comes to light, those which were
reissued in 1994 as "The 1928-1929 HMV sessions" on Heritage and Tradisom.
All in all we are now aware of a total of forty 78 rpm sides with instrumental recordings by
Armandinho, recorded between 1928 and 1946, of which only twenty-four have been reissued
on CD. At the time of writing I have heard all but two of these 40 sides. In my humble
opinion they are magnificent legacy of plucked string musicianship comparable to the work of
such musicians as jazz guitarists Eddie Lang and Django Reinhardt, Greek bouzouki players
Ioannis Halikias, Vassilis Tsitsanis and Manolis Hiotis, mandolinists Jacob do Bandolim
(Brazil), Dave Apollon (Russia & USA) and Grigore Kiazim (Romania), and the Greek
Spyros Peristeris (who played all three of these instruments), to name but a few who were
born within a decade or two of the turn of the last century. The only reason that several of
these are less known outside their countries of origin is that their music lies outside the
Anglo-American nexus. So what is it about Armandinho that enthuses me? There is in his
playing a combination of a seemingly effortless virtuosic improvisational flow, combined
with delicacy, sweetness of tone and emotional depth, and a genius for expressive melody. As
in the case of the Greek bouzouki pioneer Ioannis Halikias, who according to his son never
sang, I can conceive that Armandinho’s playing was also his way of singing.

I am constantly amazed by the way Armandinho’s musical contribution is treated in the

Portuguese media. Although there is still one compilation of 23 tracks available as a CD or an
mp3 download from the Tradisom label which reproduces Paul Vernon’s notes from 1994,
there is virtually no other intelligent writing published on his work, and of the existence of the
16 sides never reissued there is virtually no published information. Strangely, the publisher of
the currently available issue offers the “fake news” that it includes several previously
unavailable examples of Armandinho’s work. In fact there is one single piece, “O
Alentejano”, muddily transferred and “restored”, which was not included in the Heritage CDs.
One of Armandinho’s oft-played compositions, “Meditando”, which he recorded himself in
1944, has been recorded by several musicians during the vinyl era, yet the composer’s
original recording is still unavailable to all who don’t happen to have been obsessive enough
to manage to locate a copy of the rare 78 rpm disc - a task which took this writer quite a long
time.

Back on track

In 1926 a coup d’état established the Ditatura Nacional, and seven years later the Estado
Novo or Second Republic was established. Under this authoritarian regime, which was led by
António de Oliveira Salazar until 1968, and which was not overturned until 1974, several
decisions were enforced which were to affect the trajectory of the fado phenomenon. Fado
still being considered a somewhat disreputable cultural expression connected with the lower
classes, censorship was introduced and excluded themes considered in any way subversive,
with the exception of prostitution, which continued to figure in some fados still part of the
canon today, such as Alfredo Marceneiro’s A Casa de Mariquinas. Not only were lyrics
obliged to be submitted to censorship, but singers and musicians were obliged to apply for a
licence in order to be allowed to perform at all. Around this time the first fado contests began
to take place, a process of professionalisation of fado singers was initiated, and what might
reasonably be called a creeping institutionalisation of the genre. A vaguely equivalent process
never really took place in Greece unless one includes the later phases of the rebetiko revival
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period. Soon, (we are thus referring to a period at least fifteen years before Amália Rodrigues
made her first records in Rio de Janeiro in 1945,) the first fado “stars” were established, both
singers and musicians. Names such as Ercilia Costa, Hermínia Silva, Alfredo Duarte
“Marceneiro”, and Armandinho hit the lights, and Portuguese artists toured both in Portugal,
Brazil, Angola and Mozambique, and also in non-Portuguese speaking countries. Now for the
first time the institution of “Houses of Fado” appeared, which over the following decades
would develop into a tourist attraction complex. The concept of “typicality” would lead to
stereotype formats. Instructions were published mandating suitable décor elements for a Casa
do Fado, and these environments in truth became quite artificially “traditional”. A standard
performance schedule evolved in which just three of four songs would be performed by one
singer under a imposed venerating silence, followed by a pause during which the guests could
continue to be served, eat, drink, talk and make a noise, until the next musical sequence.
Female singers would wear a black shawl (originally a multi-coloured one, but black after the
establishment of Amália Rodrigues as the ultimate goddess or queen of fado). The
instrumentalists would play usually one, or perhaps two Portuguese guitars, accompanied by a
steel-string guitar of Spanish form played fingerstyle, usually with a thumb-pick and
sometimes finger-picks, and from the late 1940s perhaps a four-stringed acoustic bass guitar.
No microphones are ever used in such performance situations, which is, to this writer one of
the most endearing aspects of the fado tradition. Parallel with these venues there has, since at
least the 1950s if not earlier, existed another kind, small locales, bar- or tavern-like, in the
various older barrios of Lisbon, usually virtually invisible to the uninitiated, where local
people will gather one or two nights a week to engage in the ritual of fado. On a given
evening, there will be between perhaps two and four or five instrumentalists who will
accompany a succession of singers who will sing two or at most three songs each, often
coming forward in an order written down at the beginning of the session by a semi-informal
master of ceremonies. Most or all of the performers, both singers and instrumentalists, are
amateurs, and the “public” may in fact largely consist of the “artists”. They may come from
all imaginable walks of life, both manual professions and academically qualified professions.
In fact in the earlier days of the century many of the most prominent male fado figures never
abandoned their original profession; Alfredo Duarte for example was a carpenter, for which
reason he came to be known as Alfredo Duarte (Marceneiro).

There is a misleading myth about the classical guitar which credits Andres Segovia (1893-
1987) with having rescued it from oblivion and made it into a celebrated concert instrument,
when in fact the guitar, in its various historical stages of development, had been a serious
instrument in the hands of virtuosi at least since the 17th century. There were celebrated
virtuosi of a slightly older generation than Segovia, such as the Paraguayan Agustin Barrios
(1885-1944), and the Catalan Miguel Llobet (1878-1938) who toured world-wide. Both these
entered the recording studios before Segovia, and Llobet was at some point effectively
Segovia’s teacher. But Segovia was clearly good at promoting himself, through a combination
of outstanding technical facility and a certain kind of personality, and of course through his
relative monopoly on the recording studios during the early post-WWII years, when he filled
the need for icons in a growingly commodified world.

Why do I mention Segovia? Because my impression is that the current image of fado similarly
places Amália Rodrigues at the very beginning, the first generation of queens, which she
certainly wasn’t. A significant number of women singers of fado had achieved degrees of
prominence in Portugal and Brazil well before Rodrigues made her first recordings in Brazil
in 1945. Among those who recorded long before Amália and who attained some local
notoriety were, for example, the actress Maria Vitória (d. 1915), who in fact sang occasionally
 8 
 

among the lower classes, and whom Armandinho accompanied on occasion, and the street
flower seller Júlia «Florista» (d. 1925), one of the rare exceptions of a lower-class singer
recorded before the 20s. Ercilia Costa (1902-1985), Maria Albertina (1909-1985) to name but
two, made successful tours in Brazil during the 1930s, and are thus examples of the
"international" success of fado artists in the 30s well before Amália's rise, even if such
success was confined to the Portuguese-speaking world and to foreign Portuguese
communities. Among other recorded singers deserving of mention are Maria Silva (?-?),
Madalena de Melo (?-1970), Maria Emília Ferreira (1896-1941), Maria do Carmo (1894-
1964), Maria do Carmo Torres (?-195?), Ermelinda Vitória (1892-198?), Adelina Fernandes
(1896-1983) and Dina Teresa (1902-1984) (these eight featured on the first and third
Heritage/Tradisom fado CDs), and furthermore, Cecília d’Almeida (1910 or 1911- February
1932), Hermínia Silva (1907-1993), and Berta Cardoso (1911-1997). The latter two were
celebrated and recorded well into their mature years.

What then is the significance of Amália Rodrigues? At risk of being criticised for
“psychologising” I would venture to say that what distinguishes her singing from most of her
elders and contemporaries is the kind of emotional expression which pours forth in her voice.
In her first youthful recordings made at the age of 25 in 1945, there is a sweetness and a kind
of tender pathos, of a character I have not yet heard in any earlier recordings of other fado
singers, and which disappeared from her voice fairly quickly. The earlier fado singers on
record simply did not seem to strive to communicate with this kind of affect. Cecília
d’Almeida, who recorded a few songs in Madrid in 1930 before her premature death at the
age of 21 or 22, was explosive in her intensity in a quite different manner. As the years
passed, Amália’s voice deepened, and her expression shifted from that youthful tenderness of
1945 to a pained quality which persisted to the end of her career, perhaps that which is
canonised as saudade. While earlier singers seem perhaps to have had an inner distance to
their emotional register and to be able to employ it for artistic purposes, Amália, in my
interpretation, was as a singer constantly in the throes of her inner pain, and this sometimes
caused her singing to be marred by a mannered, exaggerated crescendo, which to my ears at
least was not appropriate to the song itself. She became, with an international career, one of
that handful of post-WWII women singers – in the company of among others Edith Piaf,
Billie Holiday, Maria Tanase, and Sotiria Bellou, whose pained expression was in integral
component of their signum. So I would dare to suggest that what has happened to fado under
the influence of Amália’s status as national icon is that the very nature of fado singing has
become defined by two aspects of her particular psychology: specifically, the canonising of
the expression of intense pained affect as a standard, and the idealisation of narcissistic-
individualistic self-projection. And this is what characterises a significant proportion of the
fado recordings I’ve heard which were made during the last couple of decades; it’s no
coincidence that most of the blurbs employed to hype current fado queens emphasise this very
defect while implying that it’s a virtue.

The fact that the narcissistic projection of personal pain is far more prevalent among
contemporary female fadistas than among male fadistas, is paralleled by the photographic
style often apparent in contemporary fado CD booklet covers, where, in a manner I find
unpleasantly redolent of the male gaze, the female singers are often portrayed so as to
emphasise their conventional good looks and attractiveness, not without sexual undertones,
and often in combination with that mysteriously vacuous facial expression familiar from
fashion adverts, which is implicitly both inviting and distanced, and, significantly in the case
of fado, with no visual reference to the music itself. 
 9 
 

Interestingly, this phenomenon is not apparent among male fado singers. My impression is
that while Alfredo Marceneiro is still perhaps the most celebrated of male fadistas, he hasn’t
spawned imitators. In his choice of lyrics, and in his delivery, he doesn’t seem to be
marketing his own suffering. Although there is certainly a kind of pain in his voice, I don’t get
the feeling that he’s saying “listen to my personal pain folks”, which I feel Amalia did a lot of
the time. Rather, my feeling is that his voice communicates with deep empathy: “listen to the
sad facts of the human condition”.

Another way of looking at this arose while listening to Adelina Fernandes the other day - it
struck me that what Amália recorded in 1945 was in some sense a crossover between the
emotional and somehow more "subjective" vocal approach of more schooled singers, and the
tougher feeling I get from the "real" fado singers, whose communicational style is thus less
narcissistic – in other words, to me at least, Amália’s predecessors were less "personal", more
"folk" in their delivery, i.e. not "look at me me me". Amália's narcissistic approach has then
as it were "poisoned" the contemporary generation of "fado queens".

Whatever one may think about all this, I can’t resist at least mentioning the thought that the
differences between the communicative styles of female and male fado singers reveal a
distinct gender structure which seems to seamlessly perpetuate the hierarchy of the genders
still so paradigmatic in so many, not to say virtually all, human societies other than the tiny
handful of matriarchal societies which still exist, outside the so-called developed world.

The iconic status of Amália has led a putatively serious CD producer to commit an amazing
crime of anachronism. The CD “Amália Rodrigues – The First Recordings” (EPM musique,
EPM/ADES ADE797, first published in 1996 and still for sale on Amazon as of 14/10 2017)
is on a label started in 1986 by the former president of French RCA. The first track opens with
15 seconds of concert applause, wherewith it continues with a pasted-in pirated transfer of a
1928 (!) instrumental recording by Armandinho, Fado Estoril, concluded with more pasted-in
applause. Amália was of course eight years old in October 1928 and would not record until
she was 25! In the same CD, three more of Armandinho’s instrumental recordings, two more
from 1928 and one from 1944, are interspersed with transfers of what are, in truth, those first
16 sides recorded by Amália in Brazil in 1945. The 1944 Armandinho recording is falsely
named Fado do Ciúme (Jealousy Fado) – a mistake clearly culled from the first reissue of that
side by Heritage in 1992, where the two pieces Ciganita (recorded in 1944) and Fado do
Ciúme (recorded two years later) had their titles exchanged. This title mistake continues to be
repeated today in the Tradisom issues, and even on a double CD issued in 1998 by the
ambitious French label Fremeaux Frères, 16 of whose 36 tracks would appear to have been
culled from the Heritage series. Adding insult to injury, the French CD follows Armandinho’s
Ciganita, wrongly named Fado do Ciúme, with Amália’s vocal rendering of the real Fado do
Ciúme, which ought to have been perceived by the compiler as being sung to a quite different
melody from the preceding instrumental track! So much for historical and documentational
exactitude in fado discography.

Furthermore we have the problem of the genre as a discursive phenomenon. While the
concept of genres is perhaps of an older date than the historical period of commodification in
which we live, the birth of the recording industry has arguably contributed, or at least
consolidated, one more need to create genres as a means of classifying commodified music –
the simple need to order records on shelves, and in catalogues, to enable both shops and
customers to orientate themselves in the enormous ocean of purchasables. The Portuguese-
 10 
 

Egyptian ethnomusicologist Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco offers this succinct

introductory paragraph to her essay on the politics of music categorisation in Portugal:

“'The categories of music are ideologically grounded symbolic constructs that are assigned
meanings through interpretive processes. From this perspective, music categories are not
bounded ahistorical domains characterized by constellations of presumably authentic and
perennial traits ..., but rather subjective interpretive models that are in constant flux. As
symbolic constructs, music categories have been used as effective mechanisms for
emphasizing unity or difference, constructing identities, inculcating or combating nationalist
ideologies, mobilizing and integrating rural populations in the modernist state, and exercising
power. Whether common-sense notions, scholarly concepts, or what Richard Middleton refers
to as "interest-bound categories".... formulated by cultural politicians, journalists, or the
global recording industry, music categories affect the ways in which musical worlds are
constructed, the ways musicians and listeners perceive and participate in music making, as
well as the ways disciplines and fields of study are configured.“ 5

In the case of fado we must admit that the genre achieved definition almost 200 years ago, for
other than commercial reasons. While Paul Vernon’s “A History of the Portuguese Fado”,
published in 1998, focuses to a large part on fado from the perspective of the early recording
industry, the first “Historia do Fado” by Pinto de Carvalho (Tinop) was published in 1903,
and its appearance was not, as far as I can discern, related to the birth of that burgeoning
industry, although Tinop does admittedly mention the phonograph in two instances. 6 He was
more concerned with presenting the textual and musical substance of the fado phenomenon,
and with presenting fado’s protagonists and participators in their social context 7 .

In today’s world of commercially viable music, the tiny country of Portugal is only known
outside its boundaries for one kind of music – fado. The fact is, that just as in very many
countries today, there are surviving local traditions of rural folk music, an art music tradition,
a pop and rock tradition in a broad sense, and, not least in Portugal’s case, a tradition of
playing music on the guitarra portuguesa quite distinct from the fado tradition. These facts,
more or less self-evident to a Portuguese, are non-starters for an international public. So for a
Portuguese musician who would like to establish a career which takes her or him outside the
home country, calling one’s music fado is basically the only viable alternative. That is my
                                                            
5
Quoted from: The Cambridge History of World Music (CUP 2013) p. 661.
6
 For the curious reader, here are translations of the passages in question:
Pp 16-17: “Music woven on a guitarra is more touching than those beautiful dramas unfolded on ungrateful
pianos and sentimental barrel organs. The chords of the guitarra penetrate with a victorious sweetness the viscera
that move the blood, they are nostalgic like the inflections of beloved voices, that the phonograph reproduces
though they are departed; they awaken in us the saddest, most pungent and most gentle of all the thoughts –
those of the past.”
Pp 175:
“We now come to a famous singer, a worthy follower of the great traditions of Severa and Custodia – Cesaria, or
the Woman of Alcantara. This girl was working in a factory in Alcantara and was living with a fadista. She had a
pleasant voice and a well-filled bookshop, that is, hundreds of verses were stored like a phonograph in her
memory, verses which then sprang from her coral lips in uninterrupted expectorations. Once, while she was
singing in a restaurant in Alcantara, a group of friends entered, fado lovers, a group that was made up of Cesario
Salles, a stone-cutter, Moraes Nautico, a piloting instructor, and João Muzanti, who had driven a carriage on
travessa da Palha and then drove an omnibus to Belem.”
7
Greek rebetika, on the other hand, did not became a saleable commodity under that name until the 1970s,
although some of the various kinds of music now incorporated in that blanket term had existed by that time
among Greek-speaking populations for at least a century if not more.
 
 11 
 

tentative explanation for why some of the music performed and sold today as fado really has
almost nothing to do with fado as a recognisable stream of musical development from 1830 to
now, that stream which has been defined by UNESCO as an “Intangible Cultural Heritage”.
Fado today has instead become what Naomi Klein would term a brand. To perhaps overstate
the case, while I would insist that there is much truth in my exaggeration, what the
contemporary Portuguese music business is often doing, is trying to sell a conglomeration of
what is basically a kind of pop music under the brand name of fado.

A comment on recording ideals

Portugal is a small country. Just as in Greece the record business was managed by small
cliques. One sound engineer, Hugo Ribeiro (1925-2016), had a long career at the dominating
firm of Valentim de Carvalho, a career which spanned the whole vinyl era and the CD era into
the 1990s. He was responsible for countless recordings of major Portuguese artists, according
to the Museu do Fado including the following, which is a fairly complete list of the icons of
fado from the 1940s to the 1990s: Amália and Celeste Rodrigues, Alfredo Marceneiro, Lucília
do Carmo, Maria Teresa de Noronha, Carlos Ramos, Tristão da Silva, Hermínia Silva, Beatriz
da Conceição, Fernanda Maria, Max, Fernando Farinha, Vicente da Câmara, Carlos do
Carmo, Maria da Fé, and Carlos Paredes. A notable characteristic of many of Ribeiro’s
recordings, which I have found particularly noticeable on Marceneiro’s and Amália
Rodrigues’ LP recordings during work on this review, is the use of studio reverb. This effect
gives the impression that the singer is addressing a larger audience in a larger space, which
inevitably reduces the feeling of interpersonal communication. In other words it is an effect
which reduces, or obliterates, the feeling of intimacy which will naturally characterise the
acoustic in a small well-filled locale. The result is an impression that the singer is mentally
projecting to a large audience rather than to a small group of people. This phenomenon, which
I consider can be noted in countless recordings of popular music, especially from the 1960s
onwards, is in contrast to the emotional impression one can experience from recordings made
during the 78 rpm era, in which there is more of a feeling that the singer is addressing the
listener at a personal, individual level. The point I want to make with this apparently lengthy
digression is that as the 20th century has progressed, the sound ideals employed in recording
studios have tended to create a narcissistic world in which the “artist” is so elevated above the
“audience” that there is no need to create, or support, the illusion that the music is a form of
direct interpersonal communication. In the case of fado, this phenomenon is, to my mind, in
complete disagreement with the core nature of this music.

Summing up - if one listens to fado recordings from the 78 rpm era and compares with those
of the post-WWII era, the major difference seems to me to be a combination of this perverting
acoustic ideal and the effect of Amália Rodrigues’ personal style. This is perhaps well-
captured in the sleeve of Amália’s 1962 LP recording (33SX1440), which is occupied by a
b/w photo of a portrait sculpture of the singer, a manifestly mythopoietic image.
Accompanied here by a single guitarra and a single viola, while I am struck by the irresistible
intensity of her pathos, which is quite unlike any other fado singers I have heard on record,
yet the artificial reverberation seems to seek to transform her communication from drama to
melodrama. It is this melodrama which seems then to have become paradigmatic for
subsequent generations of “Queens of Fado” who thus risk simply becoming wannabe Amália
clones, and who are hyped in their blurbs in terms of their intense (but unspecified)
emotionality.
Tradition and media - Paredes and Rodrigues
 12 
 

This website concerns itself with traditional music, by definition. But I will dare to ask, not
least in the spirit of Eric Hobsbawm’s fascinating and sobering book “The Invention of
Tradition” - what is traditional? Is the term only to refer to songs and instrumental music, and
manners of singing and playing (I intentionally avoid the word performance here) which are
handed down from person to person, such that the identity of the originator of the item, or
manner, is either quite unknown, or that the originator is classified as a “traditional” musician
and thus capable of generating pieces which are qualified to be legally incorporated in a
tradition? Should the epithet “traditional” be strictly reserved for those who aren’t doing it for
the money? Cannot even so-called “classical music” in fact claim be genuinely regarded as
traditional in its own way? Can tradition ever be the handed down today entirely
independently of the fact of the mass media, which for over a century have inescapably
affected virtually everyone on the planet who has ever been exposed at least to a gramophone
or a radio? Or rather - is it perhaps reasonable to extend the term to all musical praxes which
are handed down over time, and change with time, such as the various attitudes over time to
the use of vibrato when playing bowed instruments, or Coimbra guitars? I ask myself these
questions in this particular context in relation to the following.

This article has concerned itself almost exclusively with Lisbon fado, to the exclusion of the
Coimbra style, which inhabits a totally different territory - that of an ancient university town
and its student serenading traditions - which merits an account all of its own which will not be
included here. The deeper-sounding Coimbra guitarra, as developed in Coimbra and Porto in
the late 19th century, and refined between the 30s and 50s by Artur Paredes in collaboration
with his luthiers, is slightly larger, slightly differently built, and tuned a whole tone lower than
the Lisbon guitarra, and has nowadays become the preferred instrument of many Lisbon
guitarists.

Artur 8 Paredes (1899-1980), today perhaps the most well-known, but not necessarily the most
interesting of the early Coimbra guitarists, recorded ten fine 78 rpm sides in the late 1920s,
and made numbers of recordings, both formal and informal, during the vinyl era, including
some duets with his famous son Carlos Paredes (1925-2004). Compared to the playing of his
contemporaries, irrespective of his musicianship and creativity, Arthur Paredes’ expression
seems to my ears to be driven by a kind of rage, which I can’t resist associating with the
family tragedy of 1915 when he was only 16, when his father shot his stepmother and then
killed himself. This incipient rage, which I hear expressed in an extremely hard attack and an
insistent vibrato of an entirely different character to Armandinho’s vibrato, seems to me also
to permeate most of the playing of Carlos the son, whose style then became paradigmatic for
the Coimbra guitarra. So I hypothesise that Arthur Paredes’ rage, and/or desperate grief, came
to characterise his physical relationship to his instrument, such that his music was always
more or less imbued with those emotions, and that this, in its turn, infected his son’s
“musicking”. So here perhaps one could speculate on the role of actual events in particular
human lives in modulating tradition.
That these speculations aren’t entirely the products of this writer’s fertile imagination is
beautifully evidenced in the notes to Carlos Paredes’ first full-length LP, where we may read
the following quote from Amália’s composer and pianist Alain Oulman:

                                                            
8
 or Arthur - his name is found on record labels in both spellings 
 13 
 

“The first time I heard him (Carlos Paredes) play was at the house of Amália Rodrigues who
had never heard him before. We were all shattered. Amália was crying and said she wanted to
hit him - a reaction she had when deeply moved by someone’s artistry....”
I simply can’t help thinking that Amália’s violent reaction to Carlos’ playing can be traced to
his father Arthur’s reactions to those tragic events of 1915. A resonance perhaps arose within
her to a component of her own emotional makeup, triggering an echo of that grievous rage.
Afterthought – a comparison of the reissuing praxes of fado and rebetika
These days, when there is good reason to reflect upon the dichotomies which exist between
corporatist and grass-roots modes of social organisation, I have come to think of how the
Portuguese state has chosen to manage its UNESCO-authorised heritage, and to compare this
with how the historical heritage of rebetika is managed in Greece. In 2011, fado was voted
into the UNESCO ”Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” at least partly through the
efforts of Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, who is Professor of Ethnomusicology, Director
of the Instituto de Etnomusicologia – Centro de Estudos em Música e Dança, Universidade
Nova de Lisboa, Portugal and President of the International Council for Traditional Music.
Two years previously in 2009 the Portuguese state had paid Bruce Bastin €910000 (he had
originally asked for €1249000) for his collection of approximately 8000 Portuguese 78 rpm
discs dating from about 1904 and collected during the 1970s and 1980s. There is apparently
an anonymous private sponsor who has covered part of this enormous cost. The purpose of
the acquisition was of course to make this huge collection, which is presented as containing a
large proportion of the recorded production of the 78 rpm era in Portugal, available online to
the Portuguese public as a precious national heritage. This task has been delegated to the
Sound Archive of the Museu do Fado in Lisbon. There are now a considerable number of
digital transfers of these discs available on the website. 9 The presentation is in itself quite neat
– each side of a disc is accompanied by a clear scan of its label and its discographical data.
Having gone through a considerable number of the audio files, I must however sadly
announce the following. First of all, for reasons of less than successful programming, the
website interface is not so user-friendly. Secondly, and much worse, the quality of the
“remastered” mp3 transfers offered to the public is often nothing short of atrocious. Not only
is it clear that the persons who have done the job have not had the requisite hardware at their
disposal – i.e. in this expensive context, relatively modest investments in a professional
turntable, arm, pick-up, preamplifier and analogue-digital (AD) converter, plus a sufficient
choice of diamond styli of various dimensions with which to optimise the sound retrievable
from these maximally disparate discs. Neither have those responsible given evidence of
having the software or know-how necessary in order to handle the information which they
have managed to extract from the grooves. Whatever restoration software they have had at
their disposal, they have no idea how to use it. And to top it all they simply don’t seem to
care, as in some extreme cases they have even left the recording process running for almost
half an hour after the record has finished, and thus uploaded a 35 minute file for a 3 minute
song! Or, if there are skips on a damaged disc (a large proportion of the Bastin collection
consists of extremely worn and/or damaged discs, perhaps inevitable when such a huge
collection is amassed without careful checking of the state of each individual disc, as a serious
collector normally does), the archivists have uploaded an mp3 file which reproduces all their
attempts to succeed in making the stylus trace the complete groove at least once; i.e., when
parts of the disc have been played repeatedly from a damaged point, with the inevitable
silences in between, instead of the archivist making a serious, and often fully feasible, effort
                                                            
9
 http://arquivosonoro.museudofado.pt/ 
 14 
 

to edit down this raw recording to an intact version of the original, before subjecting it to
whatever software is to be used to create the final online mp3 file, the whole raw event is
presented to the public. Shameful is sadly the only adequate epithet.
Now to compare with Greece, where rebetika has not been lobbied to UNESCO until this
year, and where it doesn’t top any Google music search as a tourist trap. In September 2003,
when the rebetika revival had been going on for some thirty years, Greek enthusiasts in Crete
created an independent rebetiko-oriented website in the form of a web forum in which
members were able to upload transfers of 78 rpm recordings. These transfers were then made
accessible and searchable in a well-organised manner, and each donor had the opportunity of
contributing informative text and discographical information about each recording. The forum
chat space allowed for extensive discussion of both uploaded songs and other rebetiko-related
themes, in the manner of most such forums. This forum still exists and works even if, sadly,
unnecessary system updates and rebuilding have lately rendered it much more difficult to
navigate. After a struggle with the Greek copyright authorities which threatened to close
down the site, the original option of downloading the files was strictly limited to a small
proportion of the thousands of uploaded songs, but all the music can still be listened to. To
compare with the Museu do Fado archive: the sound quality of the Greek site is variable, and
certainly not consistently optimal, but generally speaking members have not misused digital
“cleaning” software to the same extent as the Portuguese online archive, and I’ve never heard
anything as abysmally sloppy as the worst of the Portuguese archive, for the obvious reason
that the Greek moderator(s) clearly care about what is being offered to the community and
would be shouted down if they did allow files of such awful quality to slip through. And
none of this is done on “public” taxpayer money. When I contacted those responsible for the
fado archive on the matter of defective uploaded audio files last year, offering to help, (for
free) I received no response whatsoever.
There is one significant factor which must in all fairness be mentioned here, and which in part
explains the rich source of material available on the Greek forum. In Greece the reissuing of
large quantities of 78 rpm recordings, not only of rebetika but of other kinds of popular and
traditional music, began in earnest during the early 1970s, and has continued unabated to this
day, so that a sizeable proportion of the over 25000 78 rpm recordings of Greek music has
been made available on LP, cassette and CD. The sound quality of reissues has varied, from
superb in a few cases to acceptable in a considerable proportion, but occasionally less than so;
during the last few years, an ambitious series of lushly packaged but unfortunately
destructively over-cleaned Greek reissues has appeared. I would dare to assert that since the
advent of CDs, the best-sounding reissues of Greek 78 rpm material have with few exceptions
been produced outside Greece, and these have often been well-annotated, in contrast to most
Greek-produced reissues. In the forum I have described, it must be admitted that a sizeable
proportion of the uploaded material was taken from extant reissues, even if much was also
contributed directly from private 78 rpm collections. The knotty question of copyright on
material which is more than 70 years old will not be discussed here, more than to point out
that the Greek forum is truly an idealist project with no intrusive advertising or begging for
financial contributions, unlike thousands of putatively idealist music blogs, not to speak of
YouTube.
In the case of Portugal, there was, as far as I know, no significant corresponding reissue
activity until well into the CD era, when Tradisom started up its reissue line in the mid-1990s
in association with the British Heritage label which actually provided Tradisom with all the
material for its first six CDs. I do have one touristy LP of acceptable transfers of post-war
fado 78s recorded between 1947-1952, issued by Capitol in the 1950s. Some LP reissues of
 15 
 

the Coimbra singer António Menano appeared in the 1980s. Beyond these I have yet to
stumble on any examples of Portuguese 78 rpm reissues in the vinyl era. Since the first
Heritage-Tradisom set arrived 20-25 years ago, there has been relatively little further
Portuguese 78 rpm material reissued in comparison with the Greek situation, although there
has been a considerable CD reissue activity of post-war material from the vinyl era. The
Tradisom label has issued at most about 30 sets, both of early fado and other early recordings,
which are mostly only available as mp3 downloads; the quality of these is variable, and
information noticeably absent. There has admittedly been a considerable amount of shameless
pirating of extant reissues by various more or less shady non-Portuguese labels, but the actual
amount of early material available has remained very limited. This situation must reasonably
be understood on the basis of “demand and supply”. It would appear that there has never been
such relatively widespread grass-roots enthusiasm for early recordings in Portugal as there
was, and still is, in Greece. This I take to be an expression of differing kinds of historical
consciousness in the two countries. The pure musical quality of many 1920s and 1930s
Portuguese recordings ought to be able to inspire a similar interest and enthusiasm as has been
evinced for early blues, jazz, tango, and rebetika, but it hasn’t.
In some countries where 78 rpm reissue activities have taken place, there have been tiny
handfuls of enthusiasts who have learned what it takes to make decent transfers of 78s. They
have often done a much better job of this than the big companies – witness, for example, the
magnificent Yazoo LPs of the 60s and 70s compared to the sound on the first early 1960s
Columbia LP reissues of Robert Johnson, or witness the massacre of Bessie Smith by CBS on
LP and compare that to the Frog Records series remastered by the late J.R.T. Davies. Portugal
seems to be a desert in this respect. The above-mentioned Tradisom reissues subsequent to the
Heritage set, which are mostly just issued in mp3 format, are of varying, often inferior audio
quality, and have clearly not been remastered with expertise, not to speak of tender loving
care. And - when not even the most centrally placed and obviously morally responsible
institution, in this case the Museu do Fado, has taken the trouble to get the equipment and
teach people how to use it, one has good reason to rant as I have allowed myself to do here.
To my mind the Greeks, in their “indie” operation, have put the Portuguese to shame.
I will leave the reader who has honoured me by reading this far with the heartening news that
while fado has been on the UNESCO list since 2011, rebetika is listed as an ongoing
nomination for 2017. And with the suggestion that one continue to ponder on how these
musical forms are regarded in the official discourse, compared to what they actually can be
seen to have been in the past, and to be today.
Tony Klein December 2017
I am deeply grateful to my friend and collaborator Pedro Jorge for sharing with me his unique
treasury of knowledge on the early Portuguese guitar and its exponents, and on early fado in
general, in countless emails and during an enjoyable week in Lisbon earlier this year; also for
helping me to acquire some rare 78rpm discs and recordings, and for helping me with proof-
reading, orthography and translations, and discussions of knotty points. All opinions
expressed here are entirely my own.