Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil by Marc A. Hertzman (review)

Abstract

Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil. By Marc A. Hertzman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. [xvii, 364 p. ISBN 9780822354154 (hardcover), $76; ISBN 9780822354307 (paperback), $22; (e-book), various.] Illustrations, map, bibliography, index. Historian Marc A. Hertzman has made a significant contribution to social and economic history of popular in Brazil, specifically samba in Rio de Janeiro during first half of twentieth century. This book, however, does not explain of samba. Hertzman argues that samba, Brazil's quintessential popular genre, codeveloped in first half of twentieth century with Brazilian national identity, professionalism, recording industry, legal rights and protections for composers and musicians, and a new yet tenuous status for middle-class Afro-Brazilians. Furthermore, contestations over musical authorship in twentieth century have been linked with debates about ownership of, and place of African descendants in, Brazil's emerging national identity. The protagonists in Hertzman's detailed prose are musicians, journalists, music-industry entrepreneurs, police, and occasional politician, who quarrel, boast, sleuth, strategize, and collaborate in both predictable and surprising ways. Journalists and musicians, for example, co-composed hit songs in 1910s, while journalists acted as arbiters of racially-charged morality just as much as tastemakers of music. Starting in interwar period, police helped musicians secure and enforce their intellectual property, while unionized musicians helped police enforce censorship rules that reinforced federal government's centralizing policies. The author calls attention to musicians and journalists of color in interwar period--an understudied topic, the missing middle (p. 6). We learn a great deal about samba musicians of color, nicknamed Joao da Baiana, Eduardo das Neves, Donga, Pixinguinha, Sinho, Wilson Batista, and about a few women. We also learn about journalists of various ethnicities: Mauro de Almeida, Vagalume, and Joao do Rio. He explains how these key figures in samba's evolution came to glow in spotlights of popular culture, yet, due to racial stereotypes and structural hierarchies, often remained at bottom rung in industry and received scrutiny from critics. While this predicament may sound typical of experiences in African diaspora, Hertzman foregrounds nuances and uniqueness of these individuals and their relationships with others in order to emphasize range of ways that Afro-Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro encountered and sometimes influenced popular presumptions about race, class, gender, and sexuality. The first three chapters explain turn-of-the-century changes in Rio's society during industrialization that followed abolition of slavery (1888) with respect to music, musicians, and African descendants. The first chapter summarizes situation of governance, race relations, and musical activities in nineteenth-century Brazil. Drawing evidence from secondary literature, Hertzman stresses that slaves and free persons of color may have been valued for their musicianship, but were not considered professional musicians. The second chapter builds on this point as author presents anti-vagrancy police cases and musicians' anecdotes from Rio de Janeiro during early 1900s. He shows that musicians who played popular were not considered professionals, while he simultaneously debunks a myth that police systematically harassed and arrested musicians for playing music, so-called punishment paradigm. Instead, police rarely noted that arrestees were musicians before radio boom of late 1920s, when musicians increasingly self-identified as such (p. 46); until then, music occupied a vague area between worker and vagrant poles (p. 47). Chapter 3 will be of great use to students of early record industry, as Hertzman introduces to English-language scholarship entrepreneur Fred Frigner, who created pioneering Brazilian record company, Casa Edison, in 1902. …