The death of Linda de Suza, singer of French and Portuguese variety

by time news

She was a variety singer, but her great success will remain an autobiographical book, The cardboard suitcase, published in 1984 by Carrère-Lafon, a best-seller which was to sell more than two million copies and a rare document testifying to Portuguese immigration to France. Linda de Suza died at the age of 74, announced Wednesday, December 28, her agent, Fabien Lecoeuvre, and her son, Joao Lança, specifying that she had been transferred that morning to the hospital of Gisors (Eure) “for respiratory failure” and that she was « positive au Covid-19 ».

The one who was born Teolinda Joaquina de Sousa Lança, on February 22, 1948 in Beringel (Portugal), in the southern region of Alentejo, knew how to touch hearts with the story of her journey started in miserable conditions (soup kitchen), within“a tyrannical family” (alcoholic father, ruthless mother) with eight children, before being placed in boarding school with nuns in Lisbon. The country is then governed by the moral order of the Estado Novo set up by António de Oliveira Salazar. No benevolence is granted to her when she becomes a single mother, at the age of 20, at the birth of Joao, in July 1968. “My girlfriends had been forbidden to speak to me. I was the disgrace of the hamlet”, will she tell.

It was therefore with her son and her only baggage this “cardboard suitcase” that she emigrated illegally to France in 1969 before settling in the Paris region in 1973. The shantytown of Ivry-sur-Seine (Val -de-Marne) and work in a cannery in Kremlin-Bicêtre, then cleaning in hotels in the capital. But also the hope of another life when she begins to sing Chez Louisette, the guinguette at the flea market in Saint-Ouen (Seine-Saint-Denis) – against “a bowl of soup”, according to him –, fados by Amalia Rodrigues (1920-1999). His model with Dalida (1933-1987).

There, Linda de Suza is noticed by the composer Alex Alstone, collaborator of Tino Rossi and Maurice Chevalier, then by the lyricist of Claude François, Vline Buggy, who will contribute to his first songs. She signs a recording contract with producer Claude Carrère, the man who launched Sheila. Arranged by Jean-Claude Petit, his first bilingual forty-five tours, Un Portugais/A Portuguesein 1978, already announced the program: “Two cardboard suitcases on the land of France / A Portuguese has just left his Portugal / Like so many others he came to try his luck. » The title is a success which allows him a first invitation to television with Michel Drucker.

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