When we finally landed at the little airport in Mindelo—"the Creole Rome," as Cesária calls it in one song—fans chased Fantcha for her autograph. "She's the Tina Turner of Cape Verde," said my driver as we headed toward town.

Twenty minutes from the airport, we pulled up at the Hotel Oásis Atlântico Porto Grande, where Fantcha was also staying. Built in the 1970s, the Porto Grande was so musician-friendly that the proprietors thoughtfully left an assortment of stringed instruments in the lobby for guests to play. The hotel fronted a square, the palm-shaded Praça Nova, where later that evening the people of São Vicente strolled, chatted, and sipped brandy. The night had the refined atmosphere of the 1930s, when the Portuguese bourgeoisie used to waltz at the Gremio Club, on the square's north side.

In the morning, I toured the square with Joelson Duarte, a twenty-eight-year-old sometime radio DJ. "In the 1950s, the Gremio Club became a government radio station," he told me. "In 1974, when we were fighting for independence from Portugal, the residents stormed the station. They broadcast songs that were banned."

Duarte and I walked south down Avenida 5 de Julho—which used to be known as English Street. In the early 1800s, the British pegged Mindelo as the perfect place to load more coal onto steamers bound for South America. Britain's Western Telegraph Company later made Mindelo its linchpin for laying cable on the floor of the Atlantic. But oil usurped coal, telecommunications went wireless, and the money that had trickled down to the Cape Verdeans dried up like the rains.

We passed a bust of Baltasar Lopes da Silva, one of the first writers to declare, in the 1930s, that Cape Verde's Crioulo language—an Africanized Portuguese—was worthy of poetry. Walking along the harbor, we passed dogs lounging on the steps of Mindelo's replica of Lisbon's Tower of Belém. Farther on, old men played ouril—moving pebbles around cupped, wooden game boards—while fishermen unloaded their catch: cuttlefish, squid, sole, mackerel, moray eel.

After lunch at Archote, a venerable seafood restaurant, Duarte and I set off by car to see the rest of the island. Dusty hills loomed like heaps of black and red pepper. I was hard-pressed to find a tree. No wonder most of São Vicente's seventy thousand people lived in Mindelo. Perhaps it was the bleakness of the rest of the island that had forced them to find another beauty—to make lush landscapes of poetry and music.

Back at my hotel, I was taking a nap when Fantcha called. "I'm downstairs having dinner with Paulino Vieira," she said. "Come join us." I dashed. One of the country's greatest living composers, Vieira is a bit like America's Prince—able to play almost every musical instrument and genre but unwilling to suffer most record executives or journalists.

I asked the wary Vieira, who now lives in Portugal, what he thought of the claim of the late, great composer Ildo Lobo that "people abroad...can't make real Cape Verdean music." Fantcha looked like she wanted to kill me but translated the question. "I don't agree," said ­Vieira, running his hand through his frizzy white hair. "It's not where you are, it's your talent."