Sodade

The story

"Sodade" is a Cape Verdean song written in the 1950s by Armando Zeferino Soares. Its name is the Cape Verdean Creole form of the Portuguese word saudade, a longing for what is absent. Its authorship was contested, notably by the duo Amândio Cabral and Luís Morais, until a court ruled in December 2006 that Soares was the author.

The song belongs to the long history of Cape Verdean emigration. Cape Verdeans have been seafarers and migrants for centuries and have gone of their own accord to every continent since the early 1800s, first to New England, where they were recruited as whalers and whaling captains, and later in times of drought and after independence from Portugal. "Sodade" refers to a different movement: the departure of a small part of the population as contract labourers to São Tomé during António de Oliveira Salazar's authoritarian rule over Portugal and its colonies. Departures, called despididas, were long marked with mornas sung as a farewell serenade to family and neighbours, and "Sodade" stands in that tradition; the history of migration is why morna is so often melancholy.

Bonga recorded "Sodade" on his album Angola 74 in 1974, and Cesária Évora made it widely known on her 1992 album Miss Perfumado. Kepa Junkera and Dulce Pontes recorded it in 1998. Madonna sang it on her Madame X Tour of 2019 and 2020, with the Cape Verdean singer Dino d'Santiago at the Lisbon dates, again in Harlem in 2021, and in Portugal on her Celebration Tour in November 2023.

What it says

A morna whose theme is the longing of those left behind when Cape Verdeans emigrate; its mood is melancholy and nostalgic.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words, and the performance below lets you hear them.