SOAS Research Online

Abstract

From a history of persecution and repression in the first decades of the 20th century samba became by 1940, the strongest cultural manifestation to represent Brazilian identity. In the space of a mere three decades, this musical form spread from the lower classes and permeated the highest echelons of Brazilian society. Samba, as it is known today in Brazil, inherits its rhythmical shape from the Samba Batucado. What I suggest is that the rhythmic cell that guided Samba during its rise to the position of Brazilian national music did not appear suddenly at the end of the 1920s with the Estácio composers, it already existed in other musical forms, as a creative concept and the Brazilian national style of music was the result of, not a transformation of the first sambas recorded, but in fact, the emergence into commercial popular music of a rhythmical concept which was part of the culture of the disenfranchised ex-slaves and their immediate descendents. I further suggest that this “timeline” is a direct inheritance from the Bantu culture of the Congo/Angolan slaves brought to Brazil, for it is from those areas in Africa that the majority of slaves in the states of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais came from.