An Afro-Brazilian couple-dance and popular musical form. Originally ‘samba’ was a generic term designating, along with batuque, the choreography of certain circle-dances imported to America from Angola and the Congo. A characteristic element of the folk samba is the umbigada, an ‘invitation to the dance’ manifested by the touching of the couple’s navels. Singing always accompanies the dancing. Melodic contours are generally descending and melodies isometric. In the caipira (i.e. rural São Paulo) folk samba, singing is almost always in parallel 3rds. Mostly in binary metre, samba melodies and accompaniments are highly syncopated: a semiquaver–quaver–semiquaver figure is particularly characteristic. The dance gradually became urbanized by the late 19th century and urban versions differ substantially from rural folk sambas, but both feature responsorial singing between a soloist and chorus who sing alternating stanzas and refrain.
De Andrade, who studied the rural São Paulo samba in the 1930s, held that the samba was defined by its choreography rather than its musical structure. Its short texts, simpler than those of the urban forms, usually dealt with daily activities and followed the traditional seven-syllable verse pattern of Portuguese poetry, although variations of metre might occur as a result of improvisation in most texts. This variety influenced the caesura of the melodic line of the early urban sambas, in which the texts follow a strophic structure. In the rural samba the typical accompanying ensemble includes the bombo (a large bass drum), snare drum, tambourine, cuíca (friction drum), reco-reco (güiro type of scraper) and guaiá (a shaken rattle). Regional variants with slightly different choreographic organization are the southern samba de lenço and samba-roda, and the northern samba-de-roda and samba-de-matuto. Folk versions in Rio de Janeiro are the partido-alto and the pernada-carioca, the latter influenced by capoeira.
The urban samba became standardized during the 1920s, particularly in Rio de Janeiro. The first recognized samba to be recorded was Pelo telefone, by Ernesto dos Santos (‘Donga’) in 1917. Among the most important composers of urban sambas from 1920 to 1950 were José Barbosa da Silva (‘Sinhô’), Noel Rosa, Alfredo da Rocha Viana (‘Pixinguinha’), Ari Barroso, Lamartine Babo, João de Barros and Ataulfo Alves. Several species of the form appeared from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s including the samba de morro, sometimes also referred to as batucada, cultivated by people of the favelas (hillside slums) of Rio de Janeiro. Its accompaniment was performed predominantly by percussion instruments. In the 1930s the urban samba acquired the character of a sung ballroom dance, with the backing of a colourful orchestra whose percussion section was considerably reduced compared with the concurrent Carnival samba. Other forms include the samba de breque (with spoken words interjected at cadences) and the samba de enredo, created by composers associated with the samba schools for their annual Carnival parade.
The samba school (escola de samba) has been the most important carnival institution of the century. The first school, called Deixa Falar (‘let them speak’), was founded in 1928. Up to that time the carnival groups, known as cordões and blocos and drawing their membership mostly from the black and mixed race populations, had difficulty obtaining permission to parade in the downtown area. The idea of a ‘school’ emerged not only to give the somewhat ironic impression of respectability to the groups, but mostly to institutionalize them. The two most prestigious samba schools have been Estação Primeira de Mangueira (founded in 1929) and Portela (1935), the former rather traditional and the latter innovative. Numerous other shcools appeared in subsequent decades and compete with each other in official competitions. For this purpose, the ‘sambadrome’ (a structure of some 700 m long that can accommodate up to 90,000 people) was inaugurated in 1984. The presentations of samba schools are judged for their music, choreography, subject of presentation (enredo) and costumes. Parades can include up to 5000 participants and their enredo must be national, historical, political or a homage to famous national figures, such as writers, composers or poets. A number of composers and vocalists associated with samba schools have enjoyed national acclaim, as in the cases of Cartola, Zé Keti, Paulinho da Viola, Ivone Lara and Martinho da Vila. The history of samba schools and their sambas represents a strong affirmation of the poor, predominantly black and mixed race population of the city of Rio de Janeiro. The impact of Afro-Brazilian musical aesthetics on the national popular culture is due in great part to the samba schools.
Samba-canção, samba-choro and samba-fox were hybrid forms whose lyrics dealt with love and unhappiness, often melodramatically; they were mainly ballroom and later night-club genres. The urban samba remained basically unchanged until the advent of Bossanova in the late 1950s. Beginning in the 1980s various sub-genres of urban samba have emerged, the most significant of which have been the samba-pagode and the samba-reggae. The pagode movement was initiated in the mid 1970s by working-class people in response to the overly touristic and commercialized sambas associated with the samba schools. But by the early 1990s, a new samba, also labelled pagode, had replaced the oder version. Samba-reggae developed in the 1980s in Salvador, Bahia out of the bloco afro movement, as part of the vindication of black ethnicity. A potent symbol of black pride, Jamaican reggae was incorporated into this hybrid genre of great cultural significance.
See also Brazil, §II; III, 2 and Latin America, §IV.
M. de Andrade: ‘O samba rural paulista’, Revista do Arquivo municipal de São Paulo, no.41 (1937), 37–116
R. Tavares de Lima: Melodia e rítmo no folclore de São Paulo (São Paulo, 1954, 2/1961)
L. Rangel: Sambistas e chorões (São Paulo, 1962)
A.M. Araújo: Folclore nacional (São Paulo, 1964, 2/1967), ii
A. Vasconcelos: Panorama da música popular brasileira (São Paulo, 1964)
J.R. Tinhorão: O samba agora vai … a farsa da música popular no exterior (Rio de Janeiro, 1969)
J.R. Tinhorão: Pequena história da música popular (Petrópolis, 1974)
N. Lopes: O samba na realidade: a utopia da ascenção social do sambista (Rio de Janeiro, 1981)
D. Tupy: Carnavais de guerra: o nacionalismo no samba (Rio de Janeiro, 1985)
A. Guilermoprieto: Samba (London, 1990)
A. Raphael: ‘From Popular Culture to Microenterprise: the History of Brazilian Samba Schools’, LAMR, xi (1990), 73–83
F. Aguiar: O samba e sua história (Rio de Janeiro, 1991)
F.O. Garcia: Samba: a Bibliography with Introduction (Albuquerque, 1992)
N. Lopes: O negro no Rio de Janeiro e sua tradição musical (Rio de Janeiro, 1992)
B. Browning: Samba: Resistance in Motion (Bloomington, IN, 1995)
S. Cabral: As escolas de samba do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1996)
P. Galinsky: ‘Co-option, Cultural Resistance and Afro-Brazilian Identity: a History of the pagode Samba Movement in Rio de Janeiro’, LAMR, xvii (1996), 120–49
N. de Oliveira: Quaesitu: o que é escola e samba? (Rio de Janeiro, 1996)
M. Augras: O Brasil do samba-enredo (Rio de Janeiro, 1998)
L.F. Vieira: Sambas da Mangueira (Rio de Janeiro, 1998)
G. Guerreiro: ‘As trilhas do samba-reggae: a invenção de um ritmo’, LAMR, xx (1999), 105–40
H. Vianna: The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999)
GERARD BÉHAGUE