O Fado Operário no Alentejo

The twenty-so newspapers dedicated to fado and founded after April 1910 are unanimous on one thing: on its modern phase, this musical genre was born around 1860. Its founders were João Maria dos Anjos, on guitar, and José Maior, Damas, and other in fados. The former has opened wide musical possibilities for the guitar. The latter have reformed fados, attributing importance to the memorial texts and introducing new poetic themes. From this reformulation or even from this foundation onwards, fado became more refined and became the song of the working class conscience. We could almost state fado’s reformulation was intentional. Reading those newspapers seems to indicate that. We called this segment «Fado: 1910» after learning something from those contemporary newspapers: how important the Implantation of the Portuguese Republic was for the working class song. Throught the first Republic over twenty newspapers exclusively dedicated to fado were published and all of them mention the meaning of this song to the arisal of the social and working class conscience. It’s not important now to exhaustively list and contextualize the various known origins of fado. We will follow a different path: assuming fado is a working class song, we will list the several verses and prove there has long been a research in order to structure a verse, or several ones, with a great degree of perfection when it comes to rhyme and metric, channeling a great thirst of knowledge. We will use the classical books about the so called national song, both A História do Fado and A Triste Canção do Sul, as secondary sources. We aim to highlight the voice of those who have been directly connected to the creation of fado. Hence the importance of several interviews or articles about “fado singers” – an expression used here in a broad sense.

Most of the participants on this creation were still alive in the second decade of the 20^th century. Those who had already died can be described by people who knew them, with whom they sang or played. This is where we need to focus the investigation about fado. Without serious research about these personalities, there will never be a history of fado. Basically it is mandatory to recuperate the works of Pinto de Carvalho, Tinop, based on Alberto Pimentel’s method. An analysis of the texts used and their evolution indicates something unique happened between 1877 and 1918.  When popular poets stop using exclusively the four verse stanza and start incorporating the ten verse stanza, a process of textual complexification takes place – and a dizzying one, when it comes to improvisation. Even if improvisation’s origin might have been accidental, soon it became something unique in the scenery of Portuguese popular poetry. We can not find any similiar phenomenon. But the end of the I Republic, in 1926, the start of the Military Dictatorship, the advent of the second record, the beginning of censorship and even the mandatory professionalization will kill fado as a working class song, leading to its marginalization and to the dismissal of its more amazing feature: the textual experimentation.