Samba, of course, was mixed race music, with its roots in both Africa and Europe, and promoting samba suited / the Vargas policy of encouraging Brazilian unity by celebrating ethnic integration. And yet throughout the 1930s, Vargas continued to devel...
The man who transformed Samba was President Getlio Vargas, who seized power with military help in 1930. Vargas controlled Brazil for 18 years, first as a dictator and later as a democratically elected president. He was both an authoritarian and a pop...
Samba and Choro both started out as the homegrown musical styles of the black workers and migrants whod moved to Rio. The songs of the early Samba singers dealt with the realities of everyday life in the city. In the early days, musicians faced not o...
Racial discrimination was now banned in Brazil, but prejudice and the belief in white supremacy was still widespread. So there was outrage in the press that black musicians like Pixinguinha should be allowed to represent Brazil when he and his band O...
In Rio, African rhythms began to mix with European styles. And it was at the house of a Candomble practitioner, a priestess named Tia Ciata, Auntie Ciata, that the first song widely recognized as Carioca samba, samba from Rio, was performed in 1916....
Everybody came from everywhere else in the country to live here, so even if the original bits of samba may have come from Bahia, from Africa and such and such, uh, Rio, being a more cosmopolitan place, would incorporate all influences and create diff...
In 1888, Brazil became the last major country in the world to officially abolish slavery, 66 years after breaking away from Portugal to become an independent state. Black workers were at last free to leave the plantations. Many headed south to Rio de...
The samba rhythm developed from percussion styles used in Candomble, an African influenced religion which was banned in the slave era. In Candomble ceremonies, drummers call down different gods, or orixas who are said to act as guides and guardians f...
Samba was born along the northeastern coast around the city of Salvador/back in the days of slavery. Salvador in Bahia state was the first capital of Brazil when it was colonized by the Portuguese in the 16th century. The indigenous tribes who lived...
This is the story of a country whose music has seduced the outside world and taken on an importance that goes far beyond entertainments. You want to learn about Brazilian history without going through the books? You can just listen to the music and y...