Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil

by Marc A. Hertzman

In November 1916, a young Afro-Brazilian musician named Donga registered sheet music for the song "Pelo telefone" ("On the Telephone") at the National Library in Rio de Janeiro. This apparently simple act—claiming ownership of a musical composition—set in motion a series of events that would shake Brazil's cultural landscape. Before the debut of "Pelo telephone," samba was a somewhat obscure term, but by the late 1920s, the wildly popular song had helped to make it synonymous with Brazilian national music. The success of "Pelo telephone" embroiled Donga in controversy. A group of musicians claimed that he had stolen their work, and a prominent journalist accused him of selling out his people in pursuit of profit and fame. Within this single episode are many of the concerns that animate Making Samba , including intellectual property claims, the Brazilian state, popular music, race, gender, national identity, and the history of Afro-Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro. By tracing the careers of Rio's pioneering black musicians from the late nineteenth century until the 1970s, Marc A. Hertzman revises the histories of samba and of Brazilian national culture.

Genres: Music, Brazil, History, Nonfiction

392 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Julie Capell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up because I wanted to learn about Brazilian music, especially samba, before travelling to Brazil. I appreciated the way the author pushed back against prevalent notions that samba was something that just magically flowed out of formerly enslaved Afro-Brazilians by virtue of their African roots, and that all samba musicians were persecuted by the police and by the state.

In a delicate balancing act, Hertzman acknowledges that musicians often struggled to make a living and some were arrested (often for violating ill-defined vagrancy laws) but he also did a ton of research to show that samba, and its practitioners, were never systematically repressed, and many sambistas were not as poor as is often depicted.

The sections that discussed the process of the "whitening" of samba -- when commercial interests lessen the contributions of people of color and depict whites as having all the agency-- were especially interesting and certainly one can see this still happening today in American entertainment. We'd like to think it's not as blatent as in decades past, but have you seen "La La Land?" Made in 2016, the movie where a white guy saves jazz. And so it continues . . .

I learned a lot from this book, although it reads more like an extension of a PhD thesis than something written for the person with a casual interest in the subject of Brazilian music. It might have been better titled "The History of Authors' Rights in Brazil" since a huge amount of the book goes into excruciating detail on this issue. I think musicians and other entertainers who are more personally vested in the subject of authorship and the evolution of artist's rights would be interested in these sections. I mostly skimmed them.