Hitler bombs Guernica and invades Poland. In Portugal, Salazar comes to power; in Spain, Franco. Salazar demands that all fado singers carry identity cards. Everywhere there are allied and nazi spies, looking for supporters and traitors.

It was at this time, in 1939 that the legendary fadista Amália Rodriguez made her debut at the fado house Retiro da Severa.

By then, fado had left the streets and taverns where it had begun and had entered the bourgeois venues. Amalia quickly became the most original and celebrated artist in the genre, an international star who performed everywhere, from opera houses to Broadway and Hollywood. But the government in Portugal had nothing good to say and Salazar always derided her as ‘the little creature.’

Here, Amalia sings Povo que lavas no rio (“The people who wash in the river”).
The washer women are poor and the song, like many of hers, becomes political by the very fact of her singing it, for she sang many anti-fascist poets, besides Portuguese classics, like Camoens.

“Povo que lavas no rio
Que talhas com o teu machado
As tábuas do meu caixão.
Pode haver quem te defenda
Quem compre o teu chão sagrado
Mas a tua vida não………”

— Excerpt from Povo Que Lavas No Rio,
Lyrics by Pedro Homem de Mello
Music by Alain Oulmain (a Franco-Portuguese anti-fascist poet whom she helped set free after the Portuguese secret police arrested him)

“People who wash in the river/ Who with their axes hew/ The boards of my coffin/ There are those who value you…….”

Yet, of the poverty in which she grew up, she was always dismissive:

“We never complained about life. Sure, we knew there were people who were different from us, otherwise there would be no revolutions. But I never heard anybody talk about that. It’s the privileged classes who discuss that type of thing, not the poor. And, after all is said and done, there’s also class discrimination among the poor. We were like social outcasts.”

Of God she said, “Even if he doesn’t exist, I believe in Him,”