[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":270},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-paul-fernando":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":233,"description":234,"died":235,"era":236,"extension":237,"heroImage":238,"imageCredit":239,"imageLicense":240,"imageSource":241,"meta":242,"navigation":243,"notable":244,"path":245,"roles":246,"seo":249,"sources":250,"stem":268,"translated":243,"url":253,"__hash__":269},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fpaul-fernando.md","Paul Fernando",345,1951,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":224},"minimark",[11,20,32,37,40,51,58,62,83,104,166,169,184,188,191,194,198,201,204,207,211,218,221],[12,13,14,15,19],"p",{},"In 1969 a talent contest was held at the Buddhist hall in Moratuwa, the ",[16,17,18],"em",{},"Bauddha Mandiraya",", and it had a name that dated it exactly: Talent Sixty Nine. Among the entrants was a seventeen-year-old from the town who had been looking for any excuse to sing in front of people. He won.",[12,21,22,23,27,28,31],{},"Backstage he met the lyricist Priya Peiris, who handed him some words. One set of them became ",[24,25,26],"strong",{},"සඳ පාන වගෙ ඔබෙ රුව දිලිසිලා"," ",[16,29,30],{},"Sanda Pana Wage Obe Ruwa Dilisila"," (\"your face shining like moonlight\"), and with it Paul Fernando stopped being a boy who entered competitions and became a singer. Forty-four years later he would come back to the same hall to headline a show.",[33,34,36],"h2",{"id":35},"moratuwa","Moratuwa",[12,38,39],{},"Madawela Hewage Paul Fernando was born on 24 November 1951 in Moratuwa, the youngest child of Madawala Hewage Leon Fernando and Kusumawathi Fernando, with four elder brothers. He was educated at Prince of Wales' College in the town.",[12,41,42,43,46,47,50],{},"Where he was born matters more than it usually does. The coastal strip running from Modara down through Moratuwa and Galkissa is the heartland of Sri Lankan baila, and specifically of ",[16,44,45],{},"vaada baila",", the sung debate in which two singers improvise against each other in front of a partisan, ticket-buying crowd. It was a place where a boy grew up hearing the 6\u002F8 kaffringha rhythm played on violin, mandolin, ",[16,48,49],{},"rabana",", harmonium and tabla, and where being able to make up a verse quickly was a recognised local talent.",[12,52,53,54,57],{},"By the time Fernando started, baila had already been remade once, by ",[24,55,56],{},"Wally Bastiansz"," — the Colombo police constable who fitted Sinhala words to the kaffringha rhythms of the Portuguese-Burgher and Kaffir communities and added a chorus, turning a community music into a national one. What Fernando's generation did was different. They took it out of the dance hall and put it on the open-air stage-show circuit and, later, onto cassette.",[33,59,61],{"id":60},"the-records","The records",[12,63,64,65,68,69,68,72,75,76,27,79,82],{},"His first album came out in 1970 with four songs on it: ",[16,66,67],{},"Sandapana Wage",", ",[16,70,71],{},"Ran Samanalaya",[16,73,74],{},"Sudu Rosa Malak"," and ",[24,77,78],{},"තොප්පි වෙළෙන්දෙක්",[16,80,81],{},"Thoppi Welendek"," (\"a hat seller\"). That same year he began appearing on outdoor stages around the island, which is where he stayed.",[12,84,85,86,27,89,92,93,96,97,27,100,103],{},"In 1972 came ",[24,87,88],{},"එගොඩ ගොඩේ මල්",[16,90,91],{},"Egoda Gode Mal Nelana Mal Ethano"," (\"the flower-girl picking flowers on the far bank\"), written by Ravi Ranasinghe and composed by Melroy Dharmaratne of the ",[24,94,95],{},"Dharmaratne Brothers",". Then ",[24,98,99],{},"සුපුන් සදක්",[16,101,102],{},"Supun Sandak Ahase Pawuna"," (\"a full moon floating in the sky\"), which is the one most people can still start singing without being asked twice.",[12,105,106,107,27,110,113,114,27,117,120,121,27,124,127,128,27,131,134,135,27,138,141,142,27,145,148,149,27,152,155,156,68,159,75,162,165],{},"Over four decades the list built up: ",[24,108,109],{},"ගොළු හදවත",[16,111,112],{},"Golu Hadawatha"," (\"the mute heart\"), ",[24,115,116],{},"රුවන් මාලිගා",[16,118,119],{},"Ruwan Maliga"," (\"palace of jewels\"), ",[24,122,123],{},"ආවේ වන බඹරෙක්",[16,125,126],{},"Aawe Wana Bambarek Wage"," (\"came like a wild bee\"), ",[24,129,130],{},"දෙමවුපියන් කියන නිසා",[16,132,133],{},"Demawupiyan Kiyana Nisa"," (\"because your parents say so\"), ",[24,136,137],{},"කුරුළු ලොවේ",[16,139,140],{},"Kurulu Lowe"," (\"in the world of birds\"), ",[24,143,144],{},"මුළු මුහුදම හඬයි",[16,146,147],{},"Mulu Muhudama Handayi"," (\"the whole sea cries out\"), ",[24,150,151],{},"මාගේ පාසල් කාලය",[16,153,154],{},"Mage Pasal Kalaya"," (\"my schooldays\"), ",[16,157,158],{},"Ran Kirilliye",[16,160,161],{},"Pranandu Pranandu",[16,163,164],{},"Dona Kathirina",".",[12,167,168],{},"Look at the subjects and something becomes clear about what baila was for. A hat seller. A girl picking flowers across the water. School. Parents. Fernando's songs are almost all about ordinary life at close range, told with a joke half-hidden in them, and set to a beat you cannot sit still through. That combination is why the form was dismissed for so long and why it outlasted most of what dismissed it.",[12,170,171,172,175,176,179,180,183],{},"He recorded across the whole spread of the Sri Lankan record and cassette business — Sooriya, Torana, Tharanga, KND, CRS Music, Stanley's Music and Nilwala — which is a fair index of how long his career ran and how much of it was made for the retail cassette rack rather than for radio. He also sang playback for three films: ",[16,173,174],{},"Vanarayo"," (1976), ",[16,177,178],{},"Rathu Makara"," (1983) and ",[16,181,182],{},"Apaye Thappara 84000k"," (1997).",[33,185,187],{"id":186},"the-man-on-the-stage","The man on the stage",[12,189,190],{},"What people who saw him remember is not a record but a performance. He built his stage identity out of movement: he sang while travelling across the stage in time with the rhythm, shifting from one spot to another on the beat, so that the song and the walk were the same thing. On an open-air stage in front of several thousand people with the band behind him, that reads from the back of the field.",[12,192,193],{},"This was the economics of baila in his era. The money and the audience were not in broadcasting; they were in shows — town by town, night after night, with a live band — and in cassettes sold at the show and in the shops afterwards. It is a career built almost entirely outside the institutions that decided what counted as Sinhala music, which is exactly why so little of it was written down.",[33,195,197],{"id":196},"condemned-but-not-banned","Condemned, but not banned",[12,199,200],{},"It is worth saying plainly, because the opposite is often repeated: baila was never formally banned in Sri Lanka. No gazette, no directive, no censorship order supports that story.",[12,202,203],{},"What it faced was contempt. Through the mid-century decades in which musicians, broadcasters and academics were arguing about what an authentically Sinhala music should be, baila was the thing they agreed it was not — foreign in origin, coarse in subject, associated with drink and with the coast, and beneath the notice of the classical establishment. Singers of Fernando's generation worked their entire careers under that judgement while filling grounds that art-song recitals could not.",[12,205,206],{},"The title he was given, \"the Prince of Baila,\" carries a trace of the same argument. It is an affectionate popular honorific, awarded by audiences and by newspapers rather than by any institution, and it was one of several such titles circulating among baila singers at the time.",[33,208,210],{"id":209},"three-pauls-and-the-end","Three Pauls, and the end",[12,212,213,214,217],{},"On 13 October 2013 he went back to the Bauddha Mandiraya in Moratuwa, where he had won the talent contest forty-four years earlier, for a concert called ",[16,215,216],{},"3 Po LS"," — a pun on the three Pauls in it: Paul Fernando, Christopher Paul and Vincent de Paul Peiris. Three baila singers, one hall, in the town the music came from.",[12,219,220],{},"He performed into the second half of the 2010s. He never married. After a long illness he died on 16 November 2020 at the Colombo South Teaching Hospital in Kalubowila, eight days short of his sixty-ninth birthday.",[12,222,223],{},"The obituaries called him one of the leading popularisers of baila, which is accurate and slightly cold. What he actually did was spend fifty years making sure that the music the respectable had written off kept being played, in the open air, to people who had come out specifically to dance.",{"title":225,"searchDepth":226,"depth":226,"links":227},"",2,[228,229,230,231,232],{"id":35,"depth":226,"text":36},{"id":60,"depth":226,"text":61},{"id":186,"depth":226,"text":187},{"id":196,"depth":226,"text":197},{"id":209,"depth":226,"text":210},"24 November 1951","The Prince of Baila — a Moratuwa boy who won a talent contest in 1969 and spent the next forty years on open-air stages, dancing sideways across the boards while he sang.","16 November 2020","1970s-2010s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fpaul-fernando.webp","Ada Derana","Unverified — fallback source","http:\u002F\u002Fwww.adaderana.lk\u002Fnews\u002F69148\u002Fpopular-singer-paul-fernando-passes-away",{},true,false,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fpaul-fernando",[247,248],"Singer","Composer",{"title":5,"description":234},[251,254,256,259,262,265],{"title":252,"url":253},"Paul Fernando — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FPaul_Fernando",{"title":255,"url":241},"'Popular singer Paul Fernando passes away' — Ada Derana, 16 November 2020",{"title":257,"url":258},"'3 Po LS' concert announcement — Sarasaviya, 10 October 2013","https:\u002F\u002Farchives.sarasaviya.lk\u002F2013\u002F10\u002F10\u002F?fn=sa13101022",{"title":260,"url":261},"Baila — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FBaila",{"title":263,"url":264},"Wally Bastiansz — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FWally_Bastiansz",{"title":266,"url":267},"Dharmaratne Brothers — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FDharmaratne_Brothers","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fpaul-fernando","6U5B4yA5ElaF7fIaE0tP9b000HX8MZN8b84S_TTYg3c",1787999333051]