From the heart: Amália Rodrigues

I am often asked about my musical influences, and have a ready list of musicians and singers that I can draw on. But, to tell the truth, many on that list are folks whose effect on me came after I was already singing professionally. There is an earlier, private pantheon in my heart, sirens who caught me with their songs and lured me, not to rocks and disaster (most of the time) but to the waters I would sail, the life I would live.

As a 13-year old in Paris, I saw Amália Rodrigues on television. Her voice thrilled me so much that I hounded my parents to buy one of her records. The album they chose, a concert recorded live at the Olympia, is one of the very few vinyl discs I have kept through dozens of moves and decades of living. 

Amália Rodrigues reigned for half a century as the Queen of fado, a style of Portugese song that is invariably about terrible loss. I did not understand the words Rodrigues was singing, but I listened to the record, over and over, and felt the despair, and the joy in the music, wrapped in her beautiful, smoky voice. This was that harsh joy that has very little to do with happiness. They are not the same, and I knew it even then.