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

Three. Musicians Outside the Circle, Race, Wealth, and Property in Fred Figner’s Music Market

3 Musicians Outside the Circle Race, Wealth, and Property in Fred Figner’s Music Market While politicians and officers of the law were designing and implementing the anti-­ vagrancy campaign, musicians, inventors, and entrepreneurs were transforming the way that Brazilians played, purchased, and listened to music. By the early twentieth century, rituals and musical forms that placed musicians in large circular formations, shoulder-­ to-­ shoulder with dancers, singers, and revelers—calundu and certain forms of lundu, for example—ceded space to genres that situated instrumentalists away from dancers. Spatial transformations placed new focus and attention on individual musicians, whose work was reproduced and redistributed on a new scale. Phonographs became regularly available to wealthy Brazilians around 1897, and the ability to record music in Brazil arrived in 1902. In 1927, electromagnetic recording opened up a whole new world of Brazilian sound that could be recorded and reproduced. By the late 1930s, radios were affordable to a significant portion of the population. These changes helped move musicians literally and figuratively “outside the circle” and into the public spotlight, where they found new opportunities and new challenges.1 On the Run: From Slavery to the Circus and Beyond Benjamin de Oliveira, a multitalented performer and entrepreneur, was among the most visible and successful artists to launch his career amid these changes. He was born in 1870 to two Brazilian-­ born slaves in rural Minas Gerais. Both parents held relatively privileged positions in the slave 67 Musicians Outside the Circle hierarchy. Benjamin’s mother was an “escrava de estimação,” a designation that made her children free at birth. Her husband, Malaquias, was famous for his imposing physical presence. Benjamin recalled his father as a “black Hercules”; Malaquias was frequently deployed to catch runaway slaves, many of whom returned dead. At the age of twelve, partially in fear of his father, Benjamin ran away with a traveling circus and later gave himself the last name de Oliveira.2 Over the better part of six decades, until his death in 1954, Oliveira transformed Brazilian entertainment as a clown, mime, acrobat, musician , playwright, and stage director in the circuses and popular theaters of Rio and São Paulo. Before achieving stardom, he bounced from circus to circus. During a retrospective interview, he told a journalist, “My destiny was to flee. [It’s] black people’s destiny.”3 He recalled being apprehended by a white man who assumed he was a runaway slave. Oliveira insisted that he was free and that he worked in the circus. He performed a tumbling routine on the spot, satisfying the planter, who let him go. Even if Oliveira embellished the story, its larger point is clear: proof of a trade or employment was sometimes the only way for men of color to claim their freedom in the face of skeptical authority figures. Oliveira played guitar, sang, and made several records, but he was better known as a clown, actor, and mime. His career took off in the late 1880s, and over the next three decades he starred in the circus and the teatro de revista (a combination of vaudeville and “light” comedic theater ), arenas with substantial overlap and cross-­fertilization.4 Between the 1890s and 1920s, traveling circuses were among Brazil’s most important entertainment institutions and conduits, bringing music and theater performances from Rio and São Paulo to distant locations. Most of Rio’s early recording stars spent time playing at or performing in the circus. Between 1919 and 1922, the city had at least thirty-­ five circus venues, with an average capacity of seventeen hundred people.5 Oliveira was a gifted and dedicated entrepreneur, who carefully and painstakingly built a career and popular following. Like other circus performers and theater artists, he took to the streets to distribute pamphlets and advertise his skills and repertoires to passersby. He also visited newspaper offices and provided journalists with press releases and interviews. In 1910, he directed and starred in an elaborate production for Rio’s famous Spinelli Circus of the Viúva alegre, a Brazilian version of The Merry Widow, replete with acrobats, clowns, trapezists, and moving images from past productions projected onto screens mounted around the theater.6 68 Chapter Three During one performance, an audience member shouted that Oliveira should take lessons from the Portuguese actor Grijó. “With the greatest ease,” a journalist wrote, “Benjamim responded immediately, ‘Grijó is a foreigner and I am in...