Professionalization introduced documents into the lives of sambistas that hitherto had been foreign to them, such as employment contracts and corporate registration. At the other extreme, it also led to […]

From the 1930s onwards, composing, playing and singing samba ceased to be a transgression and became a profession. Although they were still far from being on a level playing field […]

Clementina de Jesus (1901-1987) began her career in Rosa de ouro [Golden Rose], a show created by Hermínio Bello de Carvalho that premiered at Rio de Janeiro’s Teatro Jovem in […]

Heitor dos Prazeres is one of the fullest manifestations of the possibilities that opened up in Little Africa for Afro-descendant people to exercise their creativity and citizenship. Composer, singer, painter […]

In February of 1922, the Oito Batutas [which roughly translates as the “Eight Conductor’s Wands”] (though there were actually seven of them, later renamed Les Batutas) did a 6-month stint […]

Ernesto Joaquim Maria dos Santos (1889-1974), or Donga, faced a longstanding controversy over the authorship of “Pelo telefone”, which he registered under his name at the National Library, later including […]

The first recordings of “Pelo telefone” [Over the Telephone] circulated a musical genre, samba, whose origin is disputed to this day, on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Although several previous phonographic […]

Francisco Guimarães (circa 1875-1947), known as Vagalume [which means firefly in Portuguese], was one of the few black journalists of his time, and one of the few among them to […]

In a series of articles entitled “As religiões no Rio” [Religions in Rio] that were published by Gazeta de Noticias, Paulo Barreto (1881-1921), under the pseudonym João do Rio, describes […]

“The Macumba was being held out in the Mangue area in that big ol’ rowdy house run by Tia Ciata, a sorceress like no other, a renowned mãe-de santo and […]