Carlos do Carmo, born 21 December 1939: a life in Lisbon fado

On Saturday 9 November 2019, Carlos do Carmo walked onto the stage of the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon to say goodbye. He was six weeks short of his 80th birthday. The show was called “Obrigado!”, Portuguese for “Thank you!”, and the hall had been sold out since February, when he announced in a video recorded at home that he was leaving the stage.3 sources3 sources

A week earlier, on 2 November, he had said goodbye at the Coliseu do Porto. In Lisbon the city gave him its key that night. He had been singing professionally since 1964. He said he might still perform live, but only on special occasions.3 sources3 sources

He died 14 months later. In more than 55 years on stage he had sung in Paris, Frankfurt and Rio de Janeiro, recorded with an orchestra and with jazz and classical pianists, and represented Portugal at Eurovision. His story began in the Bairro Alto, where he grew up around his parents' fado house.3 sources3 sources

Carlos do Carmo was born in Lisbon on 21 December 1939, and the fado newspaper Guitarra de Portugal reported the birth. He sang under his mother's surname, do Carmo, rather than his father's, Almeida, and he told the Museu do Fado that he began listening to fado in her womb.3 sources3 sources

Lucília do Carmo was born in Portalegre, in the Alentejo, on 4 November 1919. She got her professional singer's card on 29 March 1937, aged 17, and made her professional debut three days later at the Café Mondego in Lisbon. Radio made her name: she sang on the state broadcaster, Emissora Nacional, and on smaller stations. In the 1940s she also sang in Mozambique and toured Brazil. Her husband, Alfredo de Almeida, was a bookseller and businessman. Carlos was their only child.3 sources3 sources

In 1947, the year Carlos turned eight, his parents opened their own house on Rua da Barroca, in the heart of the Bairro Alto. It started as the Adega da Lucília and was later renamed O Faia. Alfredo Marceneiro, Tristão da Silva and Beatriz da Silva sang there, and guests included the Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni.4 sources4 sources

His parents worked nights, and he remembered that family birthdays were hard to celebrate. He loved the radio and the popular songs on it, and from the age of 12 he admired Frank Sinatra. Before his teens he went with his parents to street festivals to hear the old fadistas, and their melodramatic tales of crime and passion, “histórias de faca e alguidar” (literally, stories of knife and basin), fascinated him.2 sources2 sources

His father sent him to a boarding school in Switzerland, where he studied hotel management, with accounting and languages. A 2020 interview put his age when he left at 17. He came back speaking French, English, German, Italian and Spanish, and later joked that his father, who had little money to spare, had sent his son to “the most expensive school in the world”.3 sources3 sources

At the school he sang for pleasure with the Brazilian musician Francis Hime, who lived on the top floor of his house, and he first heard Tony Bennett. The school took its pupils into town for concerts by musicians such as the guitarist Andrés Segovia.1 source1 source

In 1962 his father died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. Carlos was 22 and, he later said, still a student in Switzerland. He took over O Faia, where about 30 people worked, and paid back the money his father owed to friends “to the last penny”. He managed the house alongside his singing until the end of 1979.3 sources3 sources

He had come home, by his own account, rather full of himself (“armado em snob”), and only then did fado enter his life. The old masters Alfredo Marceneiro and the songwriter Frederico de Brito became his mentors. In 1963 he sang “Loucura”, a fado from his mother's repertoire, at a friend's house, and the praise was such that he recorded it on an EP with the musician Mário Simões and his quartet.4 sources4 sources

The song did well on the radio, and in 1964 he recorded with Joaquim Luiz Gomes's orchestra; Lusa dates the start of his professional career to that year. His first LP, O Fado de Carlos do Carmo, came out on the Alvorada label in 1969.3 sources3 sources

His sound was new. The Enciclopédia da Música Portuguesa no Século XX, quoted by Lusa, traces the changes he brought to fado to tastes that reached far beyond it, from Brazilian bossa nova to Sinatra, Jacques Brel and Elis Regina. The culture minister's statement on his death said he bridged traditional fado and less orthodox forms without ever trying to break with tradition. In 1973 he gave his first concert in Brazil, singing with Elis Regina at the Copacabana Palace in Rio de Janeiro.3 sources3 sources

Two years after the revolution, two senior figures at the state broadcaster RTP, Luís Andrade and José Nuno Martins, rang him with an unusual offer. They wanted one singer to perform every song in the Festival da Canção, the contest that chose Portugal's Eurovision entry, as the British did. He asked for time to think and rang back two days later to accept.1 source1 source

The eight songs were presented on 22 February 1976, and the final, with the results, followed on 7 March, both in RTP's Studio 1. To avoid any charge of favouritism, he learned who had written each song only when he first sang it on television. Viewers voted by cutting coupons out of newspapers and magazines and posting them to RTP.1 source1 source

Party politics ran through the contest. The legislative elections of 25 April 1976 were weeks away, and the two favourites came from writers linked to rival parties: Manuel Alegre and José Niza, linked to the Socialist Party, with “Uma Flor de Verde Pinho”, and Ary dos Santos and Fernando Tordo, linked to the Communist Party, with “Novo Fado Alegre”. Alegre's poem, written in exile and set to music by Niza without his knowledge, won.1 source1 source

Portugal finished 12th in The Hague and had to wait until 2017, and Salvador Sobral, for its first win. The festival gave Carlos do Carmo something more lasting. While the eight finalists were being chosen, he heard a simple melody he liked, attached to words he thought weak. The song was not picked, but he kept the tune in his head and asked Ary dos Santos for new lyrics.2 sources2 sources

The result was “Lisboa, Menina e Moça”, whose title calls the city a girl and a young woman. Only afterwards did he learn that the melody was Paulo de Carvalho's, and the two went on to make more hits together, among them “Os Putos” and “O Homem das Castanhas”.1 source1 source

Accounts of the song's first outing differ. Time Out wrote in 2021 that it was first heard at the 1976 festival, and the Museu do Fado lists it on that year's record of festival songs, Uma Canção para a Europa, although it was not one of the eight in the contest. The credits for the words vary too: some add Fernando Tordo to Ary dos Santos.4 sources4 sources

José Carlos Ary dos Santos, born in Lisbon on 7 December 1937, was a poet who made his living in advertising from 1958 and recorded his own verse in a theatrical voice. He entered politics in 1969 with the opposition's Democratic Electoral Committee (CDE) campaign and joined the Portuguese Communist Party. Asked in 2020 whether Ary had been his main partner, Carlos do Carmo answered: “Without a doubt.”2 sources2 sources

Their great work together came out on the Trova label in 1977. Um Homem na Cidade (A Man in the City) is made up entirely of Ary's poems, fados about Lisbon set to new music by José Luís Tinoco, Paulo de Carvalho, António Victorino d'Almeida, Martinho d'Assunção and Fernando Tordo.3 sources3 sources

The Museu do Fado calls the album a landmark in the history of fado, and obituaries in 2021 named it as a key work of “fado novo”, new fado. A sequel, Um Homem no País (A Man in the Country), followed in 1984, with Ary's lyrics again set by several composers. It was the first CD released by a Portuguese artist.3 sources3 sources

Ary died of cirrhosis on 18 January 1984, aged 46, the year the sequel came out. “His death was a very hard blow for me, for my wife and for my children,” Carlos do Carmo said 36 years later.2 sources2 sources

Carlos do Carmo never hid his politics. He sympathised with the Communist Party, sang for it unpaid all over the country and was a friend of its leader, Álvaro Cunhal, whose life Lisboeta tells in a separate article. “I sang for the Portuguese Communist Party thousands of times,” he said in 2019, adding that he never took a cent and was never a member.2 sources2 sources

He recalled that, as the owner of a fado house, he answered to the regime's propaganda office, the SNI, yet he signed a petition to keep the protest singer Zeca Afonso out of prison. In 2019 he still spoke of censorship in the strongest terms.2 sources2 sources

Democracy did not end his troubles. In 2008 he told Diário de Notícias that he had felt badly treated after the revolution, and that he was a man of the left and hoped to die one. In 2019 he described the 1980s as a decade in which he was “persecuted, very persecuted” for being on the left, and said he went five years without singing on RTP, then the only television channel. By then, he said, politics was no longer black and white for him.2 sources2 sources

He sang at the Olympia in Paris in 1980 and the Alte Oper in Frankfurt in 1982, and toured five continents. At the start of the 1990s he fell about five metres from a stage in Bordeaux and needed a long recovery; he was back on stage at the Casino Estoril in March 1991. In 1997 and 1998 he presented his own television talk show. An aneurysm in 2001 and heart surgery in 2007 followed.2 sources2 sources

His “Fado da Saudade”, sung in the Spanish director Carlos Saura's film Fados, won the Goya award for best original song in 2008. In the 2010s he recorded with the pianists Bernardo Sassetti and Maria João Pires.2 sources2 sources

He was also one of the faces of the campaign to put fado on UNESCO's list of the intangible heritage of humanity, as the bid's ambassador alongside the singer Mariza. He later recalled seven years of work. On 27 November 2011, at a meeting in Bali, UNESCO's committee inscribed fado on its Representative List, a story Lisboeta tells in a separate article. After the emotion, he told Antena 1 radio, he would see whether he still had the voice to sing.4 sources4 sources

In 2014 the board of trustees of the Latin Recording Academy unanimously chose him for its Lifetime Achievement Award. He was honoured in Las Vegas in November, during the week of the 15th Latin Grammy Awards, in the same class as the Brazilian singer Ney Matogrosso. He said he hoped the award would bring some joy to his people at a time of suffering, though he knew it would not end hunger or create jobs.2 sources2 sources

The state honoured him too. He was made a Commander of the Order of Prince Henry in 1997 and a Grand Officer of the Order of Merit in 2016, and received the Medal of Cultural Merit in 2019. The city of Paris gave him its Grande Médaille de Vermeil in 2015.2 sources2 sources

Carlos do Carmo was taken to the Hospital de Santa Maria in Lisbon on 31 December 2020; Expresso and RTP reported an aortic aneurysm. He died there on the morning of 1 January 2021, aged 81. The same day the government approved a decree declaring Monday 4 January a day of national mourning. His funeral service was held at the Basílica da Estrela on that Monday.4 sources4 sources

Within days, Lisbon's city executive agreed unanimously to make “Lisboa, Menina e Moça” the city's official song. The mayor, Fernando Medina, called it the best tribute the city could pay to Carlos do Carmo, “for years the great ambassador of fado”. By March 2021 the artist Mário Belém had finished a mural inspired by the song on a library wall in Alvalade.3 sources3 sources

His last album, E Ainda..., was planned and recorded in his lifetime and released in April 2021. In its statement on his death the government credited him with helping to carry fado from its association with the dictatorship into democratic Portugal, which drew new composers, poets, singers and audiences to it. In 2008 he had told Diário de Notícias that he hoped to be remembered as someone who gave himself to fado as a cause.3 sources3 sources