Cesária Évora

Cesária Évora was born on the twenty-seventh of August 1941 at Mindelo on the Cape Verdean island of São Vicente, the third of seven children of Justino da Cruz Évora — a fisherman and amateur violinist who played the morna at the Mindelo seaport bars — and Joana Évora, a cook at the British coaling station of Mindelo. Her father died when she was seven. She was placed by her mother at ten in an orphanage of the Salesian Sisters at Mindelo and remained there for the following six years. She left the orphanage at sixteen.

She was discovered at sixteen by the Cape Verdean composer Eduardo da Cruz at the Mindelo dockside Café Royal and began performing the morna — the Cape Verdean Lusophone fado of yearning, exile and the sea — at the Mindelo waterside bars through the late 1950s. She continued through the 1960s and 1970s in the Mindelo and Praia bar circuit, raising three children alongside her singing. She made no studio recordings across her first three decades of performance and earned no significant income from her music.

She was brought to Lisbon in 1985 at the invitation of the Cape Verdean expatriate producer José da Silva, who had heard her at a 1985 women's-festival concert at Mindelo. Da Silva recorded across 1987 and 1988 the album La Diva aux Pieds Nus at the Lusafrica studios of Lisbon and Paris and released it in February 1988 — when she was forty-six. The international response was minimal at first.

Her fourth studio album for Lusafrica — Miss Perfumado of 1992, recorded when she was fifty-one — produced the international commercial breakthrough. The 1992 single Sodade became the most internationally successful Cape Verdean recording in the history of the country's music. She won across the following two decades the 2003 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary World Music Album and the Latin Grammy Award for Album of the Year.

She died at Mindelo on the seventeenth of December 2011, at seventy.

She is honored here as the Barefoot Diva.