Cesária Évora
Cape Verdean singer-songwriter (1941-2011) · Cape Verde · Musicians · Died at 70
Cesária Évora is read about 621 times a day, in 68 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 390 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?She sang morna - Cape Verde's blues of homesickness and longing - in bare feet, cigarette in hand between sets, carrying an island's sorrow to concert halls that had never heard it.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
Photos 8
In their own words 10
Now I work, and I see the results of my work, so I have some money,” she says. “But I’m still the same person that I was before. I still have the same simple life.
This was women’s work around the house, but I didn’t like it, so I came out when I was 13
The fact that I sing about love doesn’t have anything to do with my emotional life.
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Awards
About this person
Évora grew up poor and started singing in bars at sixteen, found some local traction in Cape Verde, then quit when the money wouldn't feed her children. She stayed quiet until 1985, when a women's anthology in Portugal reconnected her with music producer José da Silva, who signed her to Lusafrica. Her debut, La Diva Aux Pieds Nus, arrived in 1988. Worldwide attention came with Miss Perfumado in 1992 and Cesária in 1995, both carrying morna's ache - love, exile, the weight of scattered history - sung in Cape Verdean Creole. She won a Grammy in 2004 and left a mark on diaspora artists and, unexpectedly, Madonna. Health broke in the late 2000s; respiratory failure and hypertension ended it in December 2011.
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