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. The title: In Cape Verdean Creole, Mãe Carinhosa means “Mother Affection.”

The songs: Evora always recorded extra tracks for each album, in part because she had such a vast repertoire to choose from, both from the traditional Cape Verdean morna and from many young songwriters who offered up their music. The tracks on Mãe Carinhosa come from albums she recorded from 1997–2005, and around half of them were already orchestrated and mixed when her longtime producer, José Da Silva, put the album together after Evora’s death.

Sometimes posthumous albums are made up of not much more than alternate takes; sometimes they are “best ofs.” But the story goes that with this recording, Da Silva wanted it to truly be a brand new album for Evora’s fans. He turned to songs written by the songwriters she loved best, from the younger generation (e.g. Teofilo Chantre with “Mãe Carinhosa" and Nando da Cruz’s "Esperança," the latter featuring Manu Dibango on marimba), and the masters (e.g. B. Leza’s mornas "Dor di Sodade" and "Talvez").

The sound: You'll hear the slow, sorrow-infused mornas Evora made famous, and the more upbeat styles (e.g., coladeira). All of it in that husky contralto voice that seemed to express pretty much everything a person could express about loss and longing — all through the human voice.