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

Four. “Our Music”, “Pelo telefone,” the Oito Batutas, and the Rise of “Samba"

4 “Our Music “Pelo telefone,” the Oito Batutas, and the Rise of “Samba” In 1902, the same year that Fred Figner produced the first Brazilian record, the writer and folklorist Mello Moraes Filho published a multivolume collection of “traditional songs.” The collection, he wrote unabashedly, was “almost entirely the product . . . of the popular, anonymous muse.”1 While established white writers like Moraes Filho earned money and reputation by publishing stories and songs mined from supposedly anonymous sources, their “popular muses” remained unnamed and unremunerated. Fifteen years after the publication of Moraes Filho’s volume and the first Brazilian sound recording, the unchecked use of popular works was no more exceptional than it had been in 1902. Unspoken rules and assumptions still determined whose authorship and ownership would be accepted without question and whose would be scrutinized. Donga, the ascendant Afro-­ Brazilian musician who registered “Pelo telefone” at the National Library in 1916, found out that not all appropriations would pass without comment. This chapter focuses on the intertwined histories of “Pelo telefone,” the ascension of samba, and the Oito Batutas (Eight Batons, or Aces), a band that Donga helped form in the late 1910s. The popularity of “Pelo telefone” and the Oito Batutas’ success in Brazil and abroad helped give rise to “our music” (nossa música), a phrase uttered with increasing frequency by musicians and journalists. It was not always clear what that music was, or who exactly owned it. To some, “our music” was something Afro-­ Brazilian, long marginalized and now finally given a turn on stage. To others, it was a uniquely Brazilian product, with ties to a ” 95 “Our Music” vaguely defined nonwhite mass but also representative of a larger mixed-­ race nation. Struggles surrounding “our music” involved two distinct but intertwined issues related to authorship and property. Ownership could be something concrete and of monetary value: formal ownership of a song and access to companion royalties. Or it could be something less palpable but no less important: the right to shape and stake claim to an evolving national identity. As the Oito Batutas toured at home and abroad, commentators and the musicians themselves debated the significance of a mixed-­race band playing what was defined as national music. By claiming both palpable and less concrete forms of ownership, Donga and his bandmates asserted ownership over “our music” and, by extension, greater Brazil. The “Pelo telefone” Controversy During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when “samba” still referred to various religious and musical practices, a number of more well-­ known genres across the Americas were based in tresillo, a musical paradigm organized around eight pulses divided into three unequal articulations (3 + 3 + 2), with emphasis on the fourth pulse.2 The accented fourth note creates two larger divisions (3 + 5) and distinguishes tresillo from many nineteenth-­ century European rhythms, which divided cycles into two equal groups (4 + 4) with an accented fifth pulse. Lundu, maxixe, and tango (not to be confused with the Argentine version), each of which was at one point called “typically Brazilian” music, all followed the tresillo form. So did “Pelo telefone” and most songs that were labeled as sambas during the 1910s and 1920s. Around 1928, the Estácio Sound (or Estácio Samba), a rhythmic pattern named for the Rio de Janeiro neighborhood in which it was pioneered , nudged tresillo aside. Estácio Samba was based in new forms of syncopation that transformed earlier rhythmic stylings and became characteristic of samba as it became Brazil’s undisputed national music. In a famous interview, Ismael Silva, one of Estácio’s pioneers, famously described the difference between “Pelo telefone” samba and the form that followed it. During the first period, Silva said, “Samba was like this: tan tantan tan tantan. That didn’t work. . . . So, we began to do it like this: bum bum paticumbum-­prugurun-­dum.”3 Silva’s rendering illustrates why 96 Chapter Four “Pelo telefone” is a samba in name only. During a 1966 interview, Donga conceded as much, saying, “In order to achieve the easiest penetration of the music, [I suggested that] we not stray very far from the characteristics of maxixe.”4 “Pelo telefone” is often recognized as Brazil’s “first samba” or “first recorded samba,” but both designations are misleading. In fact, Casa Edison recorded and sold several songs labeled as sambas before the 1917 release of “Pelo telefone.” From a musical perspective, the...