Music genre · Cabo Verde
Morna
Morna is the national song form of Cabo Verde: slow, melancholy music sung in Cape Verdean Creole, accompanied by guitar, cavaquinho, violin and piano, and devoted to love, departure and sodade — longing for what is absent. Shaped by poets such as Eugénio Tavares and B.Léza and carried worldwide by Cesária Évora, it was inscribed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage in December 2019.
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An island song
Cabo Verde is an archipelago of ten islands off the coast of West Africa, uninhabited until Portuguese settlement in the fifteenth century and shaped by the Atlantic slave trade, drought and emigration. Morna grew there in the nineteenth century, with roots in older song forms and influences from Portuguese, Brazilian and African music.
Its subject is the islands' great theme: sodade, the longing for people and places that are far away — emigrants, lovers, the home islands seen from a ship.
The poets
Two figures gave morna its classic form. Eugénio Tavares (1867–1930), from the island of Brava, wrote mornas in the Creole of Brava that are still sung today; his birthday, 18 October, is Cabo Verde's National Day of Culture. B.Léza (Francisco Xavier da Cruz, 1905–1958), from Mindelo on São Vicente, enriched the harmony of morna with chords from Brazilian music and wrote many of its best-known songs. His birthday, 3 December, is National Morna Day.
The sound
A morna is slow and lyrical, usually in a gentle two- or four-beat rhythm. The guitar provides bass lines and chords, the small four-stringed cavaquinho a rhythmic strum, and violin, clarinet or piano weave melodies around the voice. The singing is restrained and intimate rather than dramatic.
Cesária Évora
Cesária Évora (1941–2011), born in Mindelo, sang in the bars and on the ships of São Vicente for decades before international success arrived in her fifties. Known as "the barefoot diva" because she performed without shoes, she made morna famous worldwide in the 1990s with songs such as "Sodade". In 2004 her album Voz d'Amor won the Grammy for Best Contemporary World Music Album.
Other great voices include Bana and Ildo Lobo, and a younger generation continues to record and reinvent the form.
UNESCO recognition
In December 2019 UNESCO inscribed "Morna, musical practice of Cabo Verde" on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Related
Morna's sister tradition across the Lusophone Atlantic is Angola's semba. Its melancholy has echoes in Algerian raï, and its guitar culture links it to Congolese rumba. For the Mozambican painter who shared the Portuguese-speaking world's struggle for independence, see Malangatana.
