The Mystery of Samba

Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil

Hermano Vianna, John Charles Chasteen

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780807847664, 9780807824641
• eBook ISBN: 9780807898864
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Samba is Brazil's "national rhythm," the foremost symbol of its culture and nationhood. To the outsider, samba and the famous pre-Lenten carnival of which it is the centerpiece seem to showcase the country's African heritage. Within Brazil, however, samba symbolizes the racial and cultural mixture that, since the 1930s, most Brazilians have come to believe defines their unique national identity.
But how did Brazil become "the Kingdom of Samba" only a few decades after abolishing slavery in 1888? Typically, samba is represented as having changed spontaneously, mysteriously, from a "repressed" music of the marginal and impoverished to a national symbol cherished by all Brazilians. Here, however, Hermano Vianna shows that the nationalization of samba actually rested on a long history of relations between different social groups — poor and rich, weak and powerful — often working at cross-purposes to one another.
A fascinating exploration of the "invention of tradition," The Mystery of Samba is an excellent introduction to Brazil's ongoing conversation on race, popular culture, and national identity.

1 The Encounter

In 1926, “Elegant News,” a regular social column in Rio de Janeiro’s Revista da Semana, first recorded the presence in that city of a young anthropologist from the northeastern state of Pernambuco: Doctor Gilberto Freyre, as the columnist called him, making a special point of his title. The soon-to-be-famous Freyre was visiting the capital of Brazil for the first time at the age of twenty-six, after completing his university studies in the United States and after touring several European countries. In various autobiographical passages of his book Tempo morto e outros tempos, Freyre mentions this odd fact almost proudly. He first set foot in the principal city of his own country only upon returning from his travels in the “First World,” making plain that his intellectual training had depended not at all on Rio de Janeiro or, in general, on the Brazilian south, economically and politically the central region of the country.

In another passage of the same book, Freyre records a singular event that occurred during his stay in Rio. “Sergio and Prudente,” he wrote enthusiastically, “really do know modern English and French literature. They’re tops. I went out for some bohemian fun with them the other night. With Villa-Lobos and Gallet, too. We went for an evening of guitar music and a drop of cachaça [cane liquor] with three true Brazilians—Pixinguinha, Patrício, and Donga.” The style is a bit telegraphic, so, in order to show the historical importance of this little remembered “evening of guitar music,” we must clarify the identities of those who participated. “Sérgio” was the historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. “Prudente” was the Rio district attorney Pedro Dantas Prudente de Moraes Neto, well-known as a journalist by the pen name “Pedro Dantas.” “Villa-Lobos,” of course, was the classical composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, and “Gallet,” Luciano Gallet, was also a classical composer and pianist. Patrício, Donga, and Pixinguinha were samba players, the latter two, especially, immortalized by their nicknames in the pantheon of Brazilian popular music.¹

This encounter thus brought together members of two very distinct social groups: on one hand, intellectuals and practitioners of the “fine” arts, all sons of “good white families,” including Prudente de Moraes Neto, the grandson of a Brazilian president, and, on the other hand, musicians of black and mixed race, belonging to the poorest class of Rio society. Here were young Gilberto Freyre and Sergio Buarque de Holanda, just beginning the research that resulted, a few years later, in their influential books Casa grande e senzala (The Masters and the Slaves, 1933) and Raízes do Brasil (Roots of Brazil, 1936), books fundamental to the definition of modern Brazilian identity.² And face-to-face with the anthropologist and historian stood Donga, Pixinguinha, and Patrício, whose music would come to stand for what was most Brazilian in Brazil during those same years. The written testimony of the elite participants seems to indicate that they took such a gathering for granted and that both sides felt quite at ease, as well they might in a Brazil supposedly characterized (in Freyre’s influential book) by racial mixing and (in Buarque de Holanda’s interpretation) by cordial social relations. The only shortcoming, lamented one participant as the evening’s activities drew to a close, was “the absence of a few cabrochinhas [‘wenches’ of mixed African and European descent] to make the entertainment complete.”³

That “night of guitar music” could serve as an allegory, in the carnivalesque meaning of that word, of the “invention of a tradition”: the traditional use of samba to represent and define Brazil’s cultural and racial “hybridity.” Too much should not be made, perhaps, of the naturalness of the episode. Its seeming triviality is obviously constructed. It has the feel of foundational myth. Still, the fact that the gathering was not transformed into myth, nor remembered as something extraordinary by the participants or their biographers, shows that they regarded the event as an everyday occurrence, unworthy of more careful record. This aspect, in fact, is what first attracted me to the event and suggested its significance. If we look behind the scenes, we can observe that many other social circumstances and actors (groups as well as individuals) collaborated to produce the sense of harmony and naturalness surrounding the event in the recollection of the participants.

Let us begin with a rapid panorama of the city where the episode took place: a burgeoning Rio de Janeiro with more than a million inhabitants. In 1926, the presidency of Artur Bernardes—undergirded practically throughout by a decree of martial law—was coming to a close. Bernardes hailed from the powerful state of Minas Gerais and, according to the oligarchical arrangement that governed Brazil during the period 1889-1930, the presidency was due to pass to a representative of the other most powerful state, São Paulo. But signs of the end of the coffee-planting oligarchy’s long rule were plainly visible. Uprisings of dissenting junior army officers—“the Lieutenants”—had shaken the cities of Rio and São Paulo, and a similar group even then roamed through the Brazilian backlands, presaging the revolution of 1930. During the presidency of Bernardes, the city of Rio was suffering the uncomfortable sequels of the urban reforms that had been initiated by Mayor Pereira Passos during the first decade of the twentieth century and that had continued through the second, culminating in the massive leveling of a large hill close to the city center, just in time for the erection there of pavilions for an exposition commemorating the centenary of Brazilian independence in 1922. In addition, it was in the decades of the urban reforms that the current north-south division in the sociocultural contours of Rio de Janeiro took definitive shape.

Until the Pereira Passos reforms, downtown Rio de Janeiro had been a heterogeneous jumble of commercial establishments, small manufacturing operations, and government offices, along with residences running the social gamut from the poorest tenements (called cortiços, “honeycombs”) to the palatial homes of millionaires. The opening of a wide Avenida Central through the densely packed buildings of the old city marked the destruction of the the cortiços and the shift toward a downtown dedicated exclusively to business. The Cariocas, inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro, moved out of the center of town in two directions. The impoverished denizens of the vanishing cortiçes took shelter in the new hillside shantytowns called favelas scattered throughout the city on ground too steep for other constructions or else moved out along railroad lines to the North Zone. Meanwhile, the more prosperous former inhabitants of the old downtown settled increasingly in the beachfront neighborhoods of Copacabana and Ipanema in the South Zone, now connected to the city center by a recently excavated tunnel.

The Avenida Central became the city’s showcase, the location of such modern attractions as the principal movie houses, and of the cafés so important to Rio’s social and intellectual life. Rio was “becoming civilized,” said the newspapers, eliding the notions of civilization and modernity. And Rio was declaring itself modern just in time to offer a beachhead for the invasion of artistic modernism. When Gilberto Freyre arrived in Rio in 1926, four years after the first “uprising” of Brazilian modernists in São Paulo’s epoch-making Modern Art Week, a local cinema proudly announced the Brazilian debut of yet another Paramount production, titled in Portuguese “The Jazz Epidemic”: “Don’t be afraid. It is futurism. You may find it unhinged. But we guarantee you’ll like it and discover it has a very special flavor all its own.” The newspaper ad went on to say proudly that the movie would be preceded by a live presentation featuring the actress Iracema de Alencar, star of the Casino Theater, exploring “the absurd, the illogical, and the irreverent.”⁴ Carioca popular culture had not tarried long in carnivalizing the absurdist teachings of São Paulo’s artistic vanguard.

Observing these transformations, the non-Carioca Gilberto Freyre waxed oddly nostalgic for a Rio that he never knew and directed biting criticisms at the new buildings and boulevards and at the leveling of the hills. “In the presence of horrors like the Elixir building, one gets the impression of jokes played by the architects on the nouveaux riches that ordered up these novelties,” Freyre wrote in his diary, and went on: “The new Chamber of Deputies is downright ridiculous. That Roman-style statue of Deodoro would make a cat smile.”⁵ Freyre inveighed against broad boulevards like the new Avenida Central and found virtue in narrow streets like the Rua do Ouvidor, formerly Rio’s most prestigious, because these were shady and therefore more appropriate to the tropical heat. He even approved of the ramshackle neighborhood on Favela hill (which subsequently gave its name to hillside slums throughout Brazil) as a piece of old Rio.⁶

But let us get back to the matter of Freyre’s “bohemian fun” in the irremediably new Rio of the 1920s and, more particularly, the matter of the nocturnal diversions involving both elite males and “true Brazilians” like the samba players Donga, Pixinguinha, and Patrício. To bring together people representing such different aspects of Rio de Janeiro, the young Brazilian intellectuals had called upon an extensive network of personal relationships.

Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and Prudente de Moraes Neto, who had so impressed Freyre with their knowledge of modern English and French literature, were editors of the literary magazine Estética. Buarque de Holanda was from São Paulo, epicenter of Brazilian artistic modernism, and he had introduced Prudente de Moraes Neto, a Carioca, to modern art well before Modern Art Week in 1922. The two had met at law school in Rio. Moraes Neto must have been receptive to the attractions of modern art. Another former classmate, who had known Prudente at Pedro II Secondary School (where sons of the Brazilian elite had congregated for generations), said this president’s grandson had a “taste for the strange.”⁷ A shared taste for European literary modernism, at any rate, brought together the two young editors of Estética and the equally young and as yet unknown—but already extremely presumptuous—anthropologist from Pernambuco, Gilberto Freyre.

Moraes Neto and Buarque de Holanda differ on how they first got wind of Freyre. Moraes Neto recalled a letter from Luís da Câmara Cascudo (later distinguished as a folklorist) containing a clipping of an article written by Freyre about James Joyce for a Pernambucan newspaper.⁸ Buarque de Holanda remembered receiving the clipping in a letter from the future regionalist novelist of the northeast José Lins do Rego some time after announcing that Estética would publish criticism of James Joyce: “The name of the [clipping’s] author was as unknown to me, to any of us, as the name of the letter writer. I don’t have the article anymore, but I clearly remember a crack about critics who, ‘in the shade of Carioca banana trees’ have the audacity to announce an up-coming article on so difficult a writer as Joyce.”⁹ Freyre’s exact words appeared in the Di´rio de Pernambuco on 11 November 1926: “Even under the banana trees of Rio people are saying the easily pronounced English name Joyce. The English of his works will be more difficult to decipher.”¹⁰ Freyre’s ironic words ended up seducing these modernists-under-banana-trees. Buarque de Holanda says that he liked the article so much that he decided to republish it in Estética and shelve the criticism that he had been planning to write himself. As things turned out, though, the magazine folded first.

Thus began—under the sign of James Joyce—this Brazilian interregional modernist alliance. The Cariocas were surprised to see such an up-to-date study appear in the “provincial” press of the northeast, and they immediately struck up a correspondence with its author. Their friendship was not the result of a mutual interest in Brazilian popular culture and much less in the regionalist vein of that popular culture, but that interest soon became a factor. Among the curiosities that brought the northeasterner to Rio de Janeiro in 1926 was “a desire for direct contact with the composers and performers of Carioca popular music, especially the black ones.”¹¹ At the time, black samba players from Rio de Janeiro were touring the country with great success. Freyre was away in New York when the Carioca group Oito Batutas performed in Pernambuco in 1921, but he surely heard the signal influence that performance had on the musicians of his home state.

For starters, Sergio Buarque de Holanda and Prudente de Moraes Neto took Freyre to the show called “Tudo Preto” (“All Black”), presented by the Black Revue Company, Brazil’s first theater group with exclusively black performers and staff—including the maestro Pixinguinha, and the director, whose artistic name was De Chocolat. Only the impresario was white. “All Black” caused a furor in Rio during that year’s theatrical season. One newspaper called the show “the biggest theatrical news of the moment,” a show producing “magnificent spiritual pleasure” in the audience.¹² Another paper used the adjective estrondoso—“smashing”—and remarked on the throng that attended its opening night. None of the journalists or critics was shocked by the exclusive presence of black people on stage, as if that were not really extraordinary, and all applauded the initiative. But the publicity of the Revue could not contain its pride in “a victory for the black race in light theater.” It was a victory, too, for the performer called “Miss Mons” (a “French eccentric,” announced Correio da manhã, tongue in cheek), who executed “an authentic African batuque,” the drumming and dancing of Brazilian slaves.

Gilberto Freyre esteemed the batuque of Miss Mons, but the music of Pixinguinha excited him most, and he wanted to meet the famous sambista, as samba players and dancers are known, in a more casual setting, without the black tie and tuxedo that Pixinguinha wore on stage in “All Black.” Freyre’s friends drew on a tangle of personal connections to fulfill his wish. Fortunately, Prudente knew a member of Pixinguinha’s band, Donga. Prudente and Donga had been introduced by Blaise Cendrars (an interesting foreign intervention in the elite “discovery” of Carioca popular culture), during that French vanguardist poet’s 1924 stay in Rio. Two years later, in an effort to organize an informal musical gathering for his Pernambucan friend, Prudente got back in touch with Donga. The black sambista was playing backup for a band called Carlito Jazz, part of a “gay and naughty” French revue company then offering spectacles entitled “C’est Paris,” “Au revoir,” and “Revue de la revue.” The gathering was to take place in a café on Catete Street, across from the law school in a heterogeneous neighborhood just outside the city center. That night, the café closed its doors for the privacy of its special guests. In addition to Donga, Pixinguinha, and Patrício, two other outstanding sambistas were in attendance: Sebastião Cirino, whose song “Christ Was Born in Bahia” was the great hit of the day,¹³ and, apparently, Nelson Alves, another of the Oito Batutas.

Perhaps by oversight, Prudente’s account of the evening does not mention the presence of Heitor Villa-Lobos, about which Freyre’s diary is very clear. On the other hand, it could be Freyre’s lapse, expressing his desire to identify the musical nationalism of Villa-Lobos with Rio’s Afro-Brazilian bohemia. Villa-Lobos was, in fact, a carousing night owl well liked among the city’s sambistas. Freyre’s association of Villa-Lobos with the Carioca mystique is exemplified in another reminiscence written years later:

My friend Assis Chateaubriand initiated me into various Carioca-style Brazilianisms, and Estácio Coimbra, into others. Finally, with Prudente de Moraes Neto, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, and Jaime Ovalle I became initiated into another sort of Brazilianism, the Afro-Carioca and nocturnal Rio, so to speak. The Rio of Pixinguinha and Patrício. The still almost colonial Rio of guitars, serenades, and colored wenches [mulatas] whose Brazilian authenticity lent them a grace, shared by the white “missies” [iaiás] of Botafogo or the ladies [sinhás] of Santa Teresa [two traditionally fashionable Rio neighborhoods], a grace I never saw in the mulatas or the iaiás of the North. It was the Carioca grace. It was the Rio of Villa-Lobos.¹⁴

The northeastern regionalist Gilberto Freyre was being seduced by Carioca popular culture. And Freyre was not the only one: from the 1930s on, all Brazil began (or was obliged) to recognize in the samba of Rio de Janeiro an emblem of its national identity.

Another reference to the 1926 gathering in the Catete Street café appears in an article published by Freyre in a Pernambucan newspaper later that year, an article suggestively entitled “On the Valorization of Things Black.” Freyre’s tone differs from that of the newspaper’s ordinary journalistic articles. The polemical north-easterner missed no opportunity to advance his ideas—later systematically developed in books like The Masters and the Slaves—on the importance of Brazil’s African heritage. His style is almost always militant, ready to raise hackles among his readers if need be. Here are his words:

Yesterday, along with some friends—Prudente and Sergio—I spent an evening-that-almost-reached-morning listening to Pixinguinha, a mulato, playing some of his carnival music accompanied by Donga, another mulato, on the guitar and by a (really black...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Mystery of Samba
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Translator’s Preface
• Author’s Preface to the U.S. Edition
• 1 The Encounter
• 2 The Mystery
• 3 Popular Music and the Brazilian Elite
• 4 The Unity of the Nation
• 5 Race Mixture
• 6 Gilberto Freyre
• 7 The Modern Samba
• 8 Samba of My Native Land
• 9 Nowhere at All
• 10 Conclusions
• Notes
• Index