Lyrics are usually in Cape Verdean Creole, and instrumentation often includes cavaquinho, clarinet, accordion, violin, piano and guitar.

Morna is widely considered the national music of Cape Verde,[3] as is the fado for Portugal, the tango for Argentina, the merengue for Dominican Republic, the rumba for Cuba, and so on.

These chords — tonic, dominant seventh, subdominant — have in Cape Verde the popular names of “primeira”, “segunda” and “terceira” (first, second and third) respectively of the tonality in question.

One of the great performers responsible for this thematic was the poet/composer Eugénio Tavares who introduced in the beginning of the 20th century the lyricism and the exploration of typical romanticism still used today.

The main instrument associated with the morna is the guitar, popularly called “violão” in Cape Verde.

The specific way of strumming the strings in a guitar is popularly called “mãozada” in Cape Verde.

A medium-sized band may have, besides the aforementioned guitar, a cavaquinho (that plays the chords rhythmically), a ten or twelve string guitar (popularly called “viola” in Cape Verde, that provides an harmonic support), a solo instrument besides the singer's voice and some percussion instrument.

The oral tradition[8] gives it for certain that the morna appeared in the Boa Vista Island in the 18th century, but there are no musicological records to prove this.

But when Alves dos Reis says[9] that, during the 19th century, with the invasion of polkas, mazurkas, galops, country dances and other musical genres in Cape Verde, the morna was not influenced, it suggests that by that time the morna was already a fully formed and mature musical genre.

Even so, some authors[5] trace the origins of the morna back to a musical genre — the lundum — that would have been introduced into Cape Verde in the 18th century.

Musicologists cite the morna "Brada Maria" as the composition with the longest documented provenance, composed around 1870.

In the beginning of the 20th century, the poet Eugénio Tavares was one of the main people responsible for giving morna the romantic character that it has today.

The Brava style was much appreciated and cultivated in all Cape Verde by that time (there are records about E. Tavares being received in apotheosis in S. Vicente island[11] and even the Barlavento composers wrote in Sotavento Creole,[7] probably because the maintenance of the unstressed vowels in Sotavento Creoles gave more musicality).

But specific conditions in S. Vicente such as the cosmopolitanism and openness to foreign influences brought some enrichment to the morna.

In this period a new musical genre, the coladeira, reached its maturity and a lot of composers tried this novelty.

[7] More recent mornas hardly follow the cycle of fifths scheme, there is a great freedom in chord sequences, the musical strophes do not always have a rigid number of verses, in the melody the reminiscences of the lundum have practically disappeared, and some composers try fusing the morna with other musical genres.

Besides having a slower tempo than the Boa Vista morna (lento ± 60 bpm), it has typical Romanticism characteristics, such as the use of rhymes, an accentuated lyricism and a more rigid metre.