Cesaria Evora - Mae Carinhosa (2013)

Cesaria Evora was one of the most unlikely of unlikely success stories that music has ever seen. Evora,  a.k.a. the “barefoot diva” (she really did perform shoeless on the world’s most famous stages), grew up poor. For much of her childhood, spent in Sao Vicente, one of the Cape Verdean islands (some 570 kilometres off the west coast of Africa), she lived in an orphanage.

Her singing career began in local bars, where the teenage Evora sang for sailors. Eventually, she made her way to Lisbon where she was “discovered,” and thence to Paris, where she quickly became the talk of the town. Ultimately, Evora became the talk of the world, touring and recording and selling more than six million albums. With each recording she also recorded extra tracks — tracks that were not released. And that’s where the previously unreleased music on this new, posthumous release, Mãe Carinhosa, comes from.

Evora died in December 2011. You couldn’t say her death was a surprise. The 70-year-old singer’s life had included plenty of bars and cigarettes and all that goes along with them. She’d had at least two strokes and a heart attack. But still, it was a huge loss.

Read on to find out more about the music of Mãe Carinhosa. It comes out on March 12, 2013, and CBC Music is honoured to have the exclusive North American stream until that time.