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

Historian Marc A. Hertzman has made a significant contribution to the social and economic history of popular music in Brazil, specifically samba music in Rio de Janeiro during the first half of the twentieth century. This book, however, does not explain the music of samba. Hertzman argues that samba, Brazil’s quintessential popular music genre, codeveloped in the first half of the twentieth century with Brazilian national identity, music professionalism, the 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 the twentieth century have been linked with debates about ownership of, and the place of African descendants in, Brazil’s emerging national identity. The protagonists in Hertzman’s detailed prose are musicians, journalists, music-industry entrepreneurs, the police, and the 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 the 1910s, while journalists acted as arbiters of racially-charged morality just as much as tastemakers of music. Starting in the interwar period, police helped musicians secure and enforce their intellectual property, while unionized musicians helped police enforce censorship rules that reinforced the federal government’s centralizing policies. The author calls attention to musicians and journalists of color in the interwar period—an understudied topic, “the missing middle” (p. 6). We learn a great deal about samba musicians of color, nicknamed João da Baiana, Eduardo das Neves, Donga, Pixinguinha, Sinhô, Wilson Batista, and about a few women. We also learn about journalists of various ethnicities: Mauro de Almeida, Vagalume, and João do Rio. He explains how these key figures in samba’s evolution came to glow in the spotlights of popular culture, yet, due to racial stereotypes and structural hierarchies, often remained at the bottom rung in the music industry and received scrutiny from critics. While this predicament may sound typical of experiences in the African diaspora, Hertzman foregrounds the nuances and uniqueness of these individuals and their relationships with others in order to emphasize the 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 the industrialization that followed the abolition of slavery (1888) with respect to music, musicians, and African descendants. The first chapter summarizes the 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 the author presents anti-vagrancy police cases and musicians’ anecdotes from Rio de Janeiro during the early 1900s. He shows that musicians who played popular music were not considered professionals, while he simultaneously debunks a myth that police systematically harassed and arrested musicians for playing music, the so-called “punishment paradigm.” Instead, the police rarely noted that arrestees were musicians before the radio boom of the late 1920s, when musicians increasingly self-identified as such (p. 46); until then, “music occupied a vague area between the worker and vagrant poles” (p. 47).

Chapter 3 will be of great use to students of the early record industry, as Hertzman introduces to English-language scholarship the entrepreneur Fred Frigner, who created the pioneering Brazilian record company, Casa Edison, in 1902. As the first to market, Frigner quickly became a record mogul, benefitting from minimal regulations protecting the rights of composers and musicians, a cadre of international associates, and business acumen. The few financially successful recording artists were either white men from supportive families or, as the upwardly mobile Eduardo das Neves exemplifies, black...