CHAPTER 1

Pedagogies of the Soulful in Sound

Não é fadista quem quer mas sim quem nasceu fadista. (A fadista is notsomeone who wants to be fadista but one who was born fadista.)

—FADO EPITHET

There are places in Lisbon that gather fado and fadistas: places where thetalk of fans and singers, the photographs on the walls, and the songsand the stories told through singing merge and spin off of one another,teaching and reinscribing what fado is and its relation to history—bothits own history as a genre and Portuguese history writ large. Theseplaces teach one how to listen to fado, how to feel saudade, and teach onehow to have a soul.

It is a Saturday afternoon in 2002 at the bar, or tasca, O Jaime, in theLisbon neighborhood of Graça, which hosts amateur fado on weekendafternoons. There is an interval, the lights come on; people talk, get upto stretch their legs, greet one another, and order new rounds of food,wine, and beer. I sit across the table from a fadista named Olga, singingto her under my breath, trying out a fado I am learning for my upcomingaudition for fado lessons at Lisbon's Museu do Fado (Fado Museum).Interrupting my singing, she says, "I could hit you, I could kill you, butyou will never have a Portuguese soul." "But we have souls, too," I say.(Since when have the Portuguese had a monopoly on soulfulness?) I tryagain and ham it up by singing extended voltinhas (improvisatory melismaticvocal turns) and drawing out the phrase "cantando dou brado"(singing I cry) with a rubato. She says, "Now you are beginning to havesome soul."

As a central ethnographic trope, learning for the ethnographer is oftento move from "outside" to "in," with the knowledge that belongingrisks a partial blindness and deafness to a world gradually renderednatural through the quotidian. I wanted to study how people learn tosing, play, and listen to fado as a way to understand how particular affectsbecome linked to expressive styles and sounds, how these soundsbecome aesthetically and socially salient, and how in learning to singor to listen one might be learning how to feel, developing a sonic repertoirefor emotional expression (Cumming 2000). Yet for most fadistasand listeners, an idea of learning had nothing to do with fado. For many,the concept of learning was anathema to fado, canceled it out; either oneis born with fado na alma (fado in the soul) or one is not. Ser fadista nãose ensina, não se aprende, nasce logo quando nasce uma pessoa (One isnot taught, nor does one learn to be a fadista; one is born a fadista). Iheard variations on this fado epithet from singers, listeners, instrumentalists,the general public, and in fado lyrics, and even saw it printed ontiles covering a building in an alleyway in the Lisbon neighborhood ofAlfama. To admit to learning might be to reveal an essential lack, to nãoser fadista (to not be fadista), as singing with sentimento (feeling) iswidely understood as something that cannot be learned. For Olga, myvoice and performance lacked soulful signifiers. The soul, in this case,resides in a musical, stylistic, and performative semiotics of the voice.An explicit culture of non-learning with respect to fado seals "the secretof sound" (Taussig 1999: 183) upon which is writ fado's "soul."

Fado discourse shapes the stuff of a subjectivity predicated on binariesof interior and exterior. The fado voice is oft en spoken and sungabout by listeners as revelatory of a deep embodied inside, an inside thatruns "in one's veins" (veias). One fan explained fado to me as the "DNA"of Portugueseness; many listeners and fadistas told me (in some form),"Fado é nossa canção portuguesa e vem de dentro da alma" (Fado is ourPortuguese song and comes from inside the soul). This "inside" full offeeling, um estado de alma (a state of the soul, of being), is one that listenersoft en talk about as unique to the person who sings, yet also as partof a certain way of being Portuguese. Fadistas talk about singing theirlives and their stories as individuals, in their own style, with singularlymarked voices. One of the most severe critiques possible to level at afadista is that she or he is imitating the vocal style or repertoire of another.At the same time, fadistas' life stories oft en share similar biographicalnarratives and trajectories, while timbral and stylistic characteristics ofindividual fado voices (both of which are externalized indices of thesoulful) are shaped in pro cesses of learning that are necessarily social.This chapter flips over the story of non-learning that binds fado assound, fado as music, to fado as "a state of the soul." How are soulfulnessand interiority in fado learned, ritualized, talked about, instituted, improvised,performed, listened to, and heard? At the same time, thischapter understands fado's ideologies of the "unlearned" voice to alignwith widespread metacultural tropes about musical expression, voicing,and emotion where they are understood to reflect an "interior self" or"essence." What kinds of selfhood and socialities might practices of fadoshape? What are the stakes of the soulful sung?

A Tasca do Jaime

It is a late Saturday afternoon in February 2002 at the Tasca do Jaime inGraça. Men line up along the bar drinking; women sit at tiny tables withtheir girlfriends or husbands; people sitting on milk crates squeeze betweenchairs; two tourists stand tentatively in the entrance. Photographsof fadistas, living and dead, vie for space on the walls. In the back of theroom, under a guitarra hanging on the wall and an illuminated framedphotograph of Portugal's twentieth-century fado icon, Amália Rodrigues,sit two or three male instrumentalists, one playing the guitarra and anotherthe acoustic guitar (viola). In front of them, or sometimes behind,stands the fadista. People sitting at...