How old English sea shanties inspired Cape Verdean singer

When she was a young child and taking too long to get ready for school, family get-togethers or to sing in the church choir, Cape Verdean musician Carmen Souza was often told to “ariope”.
What she did not realise until years later was that the Creole word came directly from the English word “hurry up”.
“We have so many words that derive from the British English,” Souza, a jazz singer-songwriter and instrumentalist, tells the BBC.
“‘Salong’ is ‘so long’, ‘fulespide’ is ‘full speed’, ‘streioei’ is ‘straightaway’, ‘bot’ is ‘boat’, and ‘ariope’ – which I always remember my father saying to me when he wanted me to pick up my pace.”
Ariope is now one of eight songs that Souza has composed for the album Port’Inglês – meaning English port – to explore the little-known history of the 120-year-old British presence in Cape Verde. It started off as research for her master’s degree.
“Cape Verdeans are very connected to music – in fact, we always say that music is our biggest export – and so I wondered whether there was also a musical impact,” she says.
There are very few recordings of compositions of the time – Souza did discover that an American ethnomusicologist, Helen Heffron Roberts, recorded some in the 1930s but they are on very fragile wax cylinders and can only be listened to in person at Yale University in the US.
So rather than rearranging old recordings, Souza – and her musical partner Theo Pas’cal – created new music, inspired by stories she came across.
She has combined jazz and English sea shanties with Cape Verdean rhythms – including the funaná, played on an iron rod with a knife and the accordion, and the batuque, played by women and based on African drumming rhythms.