Sweet street music

Published on Friday 21 March 2008 19:11

WHEN IT COMES TO STREET credibility, Portuguese singer Dona Rosa is the real deal. Tales of talent plucked from impecunious obscurity may be a staple of showbiz lore, but few musicians have had it remotely as hard, for anything like as long, as this 51-year-old. Which lends her recent emergence on the world music scene all the gloss of a real-life fairytale.

Rosa Francelina Dias Martins was born in Oporto in 1957, one of eight children in a desperately poor family. Home comprised one room, and the main household income came from begging. At four she was blinded by the same bout of meningitis that left her mother paralysed. Although welfare provision was minimal, destitution qualified her to attend special schools until her late teens, first in Lisbon and then back in Oporto. Beyond this, however, with her family unable to support her, she had to fend for herself.

Returning to Lisbon, Dona Rosa – to use her preferred public sobriquet – began selling lottery tickets on the streets, one of the few occupations available to blind people. With no secure home, forced once again into begging to supplement her earnings, she would sometimes revisit her childhood love of singing, consoling herself and her friends with long-remembered favourites from the radio.

These songs would often be accompanied by the chink of coins from passers-by, and when Dona Rosa was one day robbed of her entire lottery stock, those same friends urged her to make her beautiful voice her livelihood.

"It was really in desperation that I started singing for money," she says, with her guitarist, Raul Abreu, acting as translator. "Singing had always made me feel good, and I like to share those feelings – now I needed it to make my living. One of my friends gave me a triangle, which helped me sing in time and in tune, and the street became my stage."

And so it was, for nearly 20 years. Dona Rosa became a fixture on Lisbon's streets. "Sometimes I dreamed of being a telephonist," she says. "That was one of the only jobs a blind person could take. But mostly I thought about day-to-day survival. I lived in the present – I didn't think of the future."

One day, in 1999, she was approached on the street and invited to be in a movie. Austrian multi-media artist Andr Heller, it turned out, had heard her singing on a visit years before, and had never forgotten it. Now he was directing a TV production, Voices of God, featuring spiritual singers from around the world, and had dispatched a researcher to track her down.

The programme was quite an extravaganza. All the artists involved were brought together for a live performance at the 16th-century Badia Palace in Marrakech, with Dona Rosa singing alongside the likes of Pakistan's Sabri Brothers, Zimbabwe's Black Umfolosi and Bulgaria's Voices Angelite.

"I was very surprised," she says, recalling this turn of events with colossal understatement. "It only really sank in when I got on the plane to Morocco. I'd never flown before. And it was so exciting going to such a different country, meeting so many different people and musicians – it changed my life."

Among those gathered in Marrakech were representatives from German world music label Jaro, who wasted no time in signing Dona Rosa to make an album, mesmerised by the emotional authority of her voice. That debut recording, Historias da Rua (Stories of the Street), included one song recorded on the Lisbon streets. Its release in 2000, together with a showcase appearance at that year's WOMEX convention in Berlin, began to spread the word about this untutored natural, and its 2003 follow-up, Segredos (Secrets), caught the ear of world music broadcaster Charlie Gillett, who included one of its tracks on his influential end-of-year compilation.

Since then, Dona Rosa has performed in Russia, Turkey, Greece, Taiwan and North America, releasing her third album, Alma Livre (Free Spirit), last year. As well as sad songs, her repertoire includes popular numbers and traditional ballads, some still accompanied solely by her trusty triangle, others featuring arrangements of accordion, guitar and percussion.

"My singing is still really the same as it was when I was on the street," she says. "Each album has become more complex, and I have learned to sing with more musicians and instruments, but for me the important thing is always emotion and communication."

Although she still revisits her erstwhile alfresco "stage" from time to time, Dona Rosa is in no doubt as to the advantages of concert performance. "You have the full attention of the crowd! On the street people are walking past and talking among themselves, not always listening. Then there is the quiet – it is so much better to sing without the background noise, which can be very distracting."

In between touring, her life has changed relatively little. She lives in a small apartment in Lisbon, and remains close to her former companions of the road. "I still sometimes sing on the street, but now I have CDs to sell," she says. "I live alone, so I often go and visit my friends on the streets – and now I can give them some money, too."

&#149 Dona Rosa appears at The Blend Festival at the Tolbooth, Stirling, on Sunday 30 March. For more information, visit www.theblendfestival.com and www.myspace.com/rosadona