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

Abstract

Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil, by Marc A. Hertzman. Durham, Duke University Press, 2013. xvii, 364 pp. $25.95 US (paper). Based on diverse sources that include memoirs, newspapers, arrest records, recording company papers, and the registrations by which musicians claimed of songs, Marc Hertzman's book lives up to the title's bold claim. This new history of race and Brazilian music deserves a wide readership for its linkage of samba's development, the emergence of a music market, intellectual property law, and the rise of the now discredited view that Brazil was a racial democracy. Hertzman challenges widely-held assumptions about samba, explains their origins, and presents a sophisticated analysis about the interplay between race and music that moves elegantly from the police blotter to the arcana of royalty distributions. A conventional story holds that the first successful samba (the term refers both to the genre and to an individual piece of music) was Pelo telefone, registered in 1916 by a young black musician nicknamed Donga; recorded early the next year by Casa Edison, it became the hit of 1917's Carnival. Within a few years, samba had taken the country by storm and, by the 1920s, the term referred to any Carnival music. Donga's attempt to claim was controversial and other black musicians accused him of claiming their work as his own and of seeking to profit from his fellow Affo-Brazilians. For decades, musicians, folklorists, and historians have held that, prior to about 1920, the police actively repressed samba. Based on 400 vagrancy trials and other court cases involving well-known samba musicians, Hertzman finds little evidence for this punishment paradigm. While musicians were occasionally arrested for vagrancy, and some well-known ones fell afoul of the law for other reasons, music scarcely concerned the police. Through the punishment paradigm, samba musicians later denounced police racism and claimed authenticity, but it also allowed some to avoid admitting their involvement in more serious crimes, particularly against women. Instead, Rio de Janeiro's Afro-Brazilian musicians faced more subtle and insidious legal and economic challenges, as well as discursive and cultural ones. Analysis of these questions is the core of Hertzman's book. Brazil's first intellectual property law, passed in 1898, gave authors the sole right to authorize reproductions of their work and the surviving contracts between Fred Figner's Casa Edison (which dominated the music industry in the early twentieth century) and its musicians show how little most of them made. Figner promoted some Afro-Brazilian musicians, among them Eduardo das Neves, who struggled against racialized assumptions about wealth, ownership, and authorship (p. 81). Writer Joao do Rio dismissed him as out-of-place and uppity malandro (hustler, an image that many samba musicians cultivated); others ridiculed such upwardly-mobile Afro-Brazilians. The music market was a highly-visible venue in which black musicians were not just entertainers; they crystalized racial fears and fantasies (p. 92) and raised questions about the very nature of Brazil. …