Cape Verde and the Songs that Crossed the Sea

Far out in the Atlantic Ocean, west of Africa, ten islands sit together in the wind. They are called Cape Verde.

They are dry, rocky, salty islands. On some of them almost nothing grows. There are old volcanoes, black sand beaches, and villages painted blue and yellow, clinging to the sides of steep hills.

Because the islands sit in the middle of the ocean, ships have always stopped there, and people have always been leaving from them to look for work far away. Almost every family in Cape Verde has somebody who lives overseas.

So the people of Cape Verde made a kind of music about exactly that feeling — missing somebody who is far away, and loving them anyway. It has a slow, swaying rhythm, like a boat. They call it morna.

And there was a woman named Cesária Évora who sang it better than anyone.

She sang in small bars on the island of São Vicente for many years, and hardly anybody outside Cape Verde knew her name. Then, when she was already grey-haired, the world finally heard her. She sang in enormous concert halls in Paris and New York and Tokyo — and she always walked onto the stage barefoot, because that is how she had always sung at home.

People called her the Barefoot Diva. Her voice carried ten small windy islands all the way around the world.

Goodnight. Somewhere a slow song is still playing.