The amount of detailed scholarly material on Portuguese fado available in English is still relatively scant, making any new book a potentially exciting prospect for those who wish to learn more about the genre. The work published in English over the last 15 years, whether academic or journalistic, has mostly been written by authors from outside Portugal and Lila Gray's book is no exception. However, Gray has got closer than many outsiders to the heart of this often guarded musical world by undertaking extensive ethnographic fieldwork over the course of a decade. Gray's most intensive period of fieldwork took place between 2001 and 2003, resulting in a doctoral thesis on fado performance in 2005. This work provided a compelling account of the embodiment of place and history in amateur, semi-professional and professional fado practice, mixing detailed ethnographic study with theories of gender, place, embodied performance and affect. Fado Resounding continues this exploration following the completion of additional fieldwork and the partial revision of some of the earlier findings and theories. The transition from thesis to book is for the most part successful, although there are places where the movement of sections has resulted in occasional lack of flow or even repetition. The main addition to the text has been the citation of more recent work on fado and, more notably perhaps, reference to a larger amount of theoretical work relating to place and affect.

Following an introduction which places fado in social, historical and musicological contexts, the first chapter concerns the learning of fado singing, or what Gray calls ‘pedagogies of the soulful’. This chapter provides a fascinating insight into the considerable technical and ideological challenges facing a student of fado, made even more difficult when one is an outsider and not ‘born’ to the genre. Here, and throughout the book, Gray adopts a fairly neutral tone as she places her own attempts to learn more about this music and its culture alongside the often essentialising (and easily contradicted) proclamations of certain interlocutors. A chapter on history follows, with fado being placed in the context of Portugal's colonial past and postcolonial, globalised present. Gray is rightly critical of the romantic and nationalist discourses that have shaped the way fado is spoken about, mythologised and protected. The fencing-off that one encounters when dealing with this genre often seems to amount to a ‘keep out’ sign, with fado becoming, in the eyes of some, a language that doesn't want to be learned. Moving from time to space, the third chapter deals with fado's notable relationship to the city of Lisbon and its role as an urban music that both soundtracks and takes soundings from the real and imagined city. Subsequent chapters deal with soulfulness and gender, paving the way for an enjoyable and detailed final chapter on the great diva of fado, Amália Rodrigues. Even when dealing with this most international of stars, however, Gray does not neglect her ethnomusicological focus, quizzing Amália fans on what their idol means to them.

For a work that celebrates live, amateur performance, Gray makes a number of interesting points about recording, especially the use of recordings in fado lessons. She points out the paradoxes between the presentation of fado as something one is born with and lives and the various attempts to fix the form in one way or another. In ethnographic work, recording has often been painted as a reduction of rich musical tradition and of the activities of musicking; recording is seen (or heard) to standardise, reduce, shorten or flatten. But, as Gray points out, it is the recorded fado archive that has led to a growth in awareness of styles that had long been forgotten or neglected. The implication is that oral/aural tradition (that not reliant on recordings) is just as likely to reduce or flatten because selection is always at work in the passing on of tradition. The recorded archive ‘remembers’ more than the living tradition bearers. This may mean nothing if the archive is not visited, if natural selection is allowed to shape the tradition, but it does at least put the lie to the notion that recording takes something away.

While there is a laudable attempt in Fado Resounding to bring ethnographic study of amateur music making into dialogue with critical and cultural theory, the results are not always successful. While, as one would expect from a report based on fieldwork, there is considerable space devoted to detailing the Lisbon fado scene, much less time is spent on clarifying and working through the theory. Too often, theorists are cited as if citation were enough, and the reader is left to make the connections. Theories are not really explained or modified (or we are not told if they need to be modified) in order to work with examples. This leads to the false impression that one can have work which provides rich ethnographic details or rich cultural theory but not both. To note this is certainly not to complain about the potential for combining these two approaches. Nor is it an authenticist concern over whether fado can bear the weight of cultural theory: it can. Indeed, I am very ready to have fado connected to affect theory and much else but I would like to have the theory explained and personalised in much greater detail.

Gray's book is hardly alone in neglecting this explicatory role when it comes to theory and theorists. It is perhaps an inevitable aspect of the sheer amount of material and methods available to scholars that we sometimes feel the need to use shortcuts (of which citations are a form) when applying those we have selected. But that same abundance means that we cannot assume familiarity with the ‘universal’ aspects of any given theory any more than we can with the ‘local’ features of our case studies or informants. Where authors might once have thrown in allusions to classical culture or (Western) philosophy with an expectation they would be understood, the same cannot be said or done for the myriad theories available to scholars now.

Ultimately the strengths of Fado Resounding reside in the detailed ethnographic work carried out by Gray and in the elaboration of the amateur fado scene(s) of Lisbon. The text will certainly be required reading for anyone wishing to understand this bittersweet genre and its complex relationship with its past, place, politics and people. There is much here for a wider readership too, especially those interested in urban popular music genres, the relationship between local and global music cultures, and the benefits and challenges of combining different theoretical approaches to the study of culture.