Making Samba

In November 1916, a young Afro-Brazilian musician named Donga registered sheet music for the song "Pelo telefone" ("On the Telephone") at the National Library in Rio de Janeiro. This apparently simple act-claiming ownership of a musical composition-set in motion a series of events that would shake Brazil's cultural landscape. Before the debut of "Pelo telephone," samba was a somewhat obscure term, but by the late 1920s, the wildly popular song had helped to make it synonymous with Brazilian national music.

The success of "Pelo telephone" embroiled Donga in controversy. A group of musicians claimed that he had stolen their work, and a prominent journalist accused him of selling out his people in pursuit of profit and fame. Within this single episode are many of the concerns that animate Making Samba, including intellectual property claims, the Brazilian state, popular music, race, gender, national identity, and the history of Afro-Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro. By tracing the careers of Rio's pioneering black musicians from the late nineteenth century until the 1970s, Marc A. Hertzman revises the histories of samba and of Brazilian national culture.

“[T]his book is highly recommended for anyone interested in Brazilian culture with a focus on the following keywords: samba, race, gender, national identity, music industry, music journalism, authorship and royalty societies, as well as biographies of many outstanding musicians."”

"Making Samba is revisionist history at its best. Marc A. Hertzman takes on cherished myths of Brazilian popular culture and carefully debunks them, demonstrating through pioneering research and painstaking analysis where, how, and why they were created. In addition, he illuminates the links between popular music, race, labor, and intellectual property. This should attract considerable attention; no other study of Brazil has done similar work." - Bryan McCann, author of Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil "Samba, the quintessential Brazilian musical genre, has been at the center of controversies and myths about national identity, racial democracy, and cultural authenticity for nearly a century, with each generation going over more or less the same ground. What these debates desperately needed was a fresh perspective, grounded in new and significant evidence, and that is just what Marc A. Hertzman provides in this deeply researched and cogently argued historical study. Making Samba takes the discussion of music, race, and authority to a whole new level of sophistication. Hertzman explores the changing contours of the music 'business' in Brazil, the spaces that black performers could carve out for themselves, and the costs they incurred when they sought to challenge existing racial, intellectual, and economic hierarchies. The result is a social and cultural history of samba that is by turns fascinating and sobering, and a book that anyone interested in questions of race, music, and nation will want to read." - Barbara Weinstein,author of For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in Sao Paulo, 1920-1964

Marc A. Hertzman is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and Director of the Center for Brazilian Studies at Columbia University.

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