LITMIR.BIZ

      In 1938, when Dona Senhorinha Freire Barbosa was eighteen years old, the Mission of Folkloric Research visited her hometown of Tacaratu, Pernambuco, as part of a trek through Northeast Brazil to record folk music. Recordings of Dona Senhorinha—informant 490—contributed to a project that profoundly shaped notions of Brazilian musical patrimony. The Mission of Folkloric Research, envisioned by the celebrated modernist writer and musicologist Mário de Andrade, recorded in several interior towns in the states of Pernambuco and Paraíba, including Tacaratu, Patos, Pombal, and Arcoverde, the epicenter of the research reported in this volume.

      The team of recordists brought the discs from the rural interior of the Northeast to an archive in the more industrialized Southeast, where scholars and musicians defined Brazilian musical folklore as they compiled the tracks. Composers and performers treated the melodies from Mário de Andrade’s expeditions as “raw materials,” forging a new framework of musical Brazilian-ness and contributing to the rise of samba as a national emblem. The combination of Luso- and Afro-Brazilian musical sensibilities came to celebrate cultural and racial mixture as a source of Brazilian national uniqueness. Andrade’s itineraries reinforced this particular musical mapping of culture. Within the story of samba, the Northeast serves a reservoir of tradition, while Rio de Janeiro in the Southeast serves as the site where the genre later coalesced.

      The Brazilian ethnomusicologist Carlos Sandroni was pleased to find informant 490 still alive and well when his recording project retraced the route of the Mission of Folkloric Research sixty-five years later, in 2003. None of those who were recorded in 1938 had been granted access to the recordings, which had remained in São Paulo ever since the expedition returned there. His video camera rolling, Sandroni placed bulky headphones on the elderly woman’s head. Her eyes lit up as she heard the recording of her voice for the first time. Dona Senhorinha became nostalgic as she listened to the song. She was delighted to recognize herself and began to sing along, reminiscing about another singer on the recording, whose voice she recognized. After the song finished playing she began to remember other songs from her childhood. She jumped up and, despite her frail frame, managed to demonstrate the coco dance step.

      The showing of the video of Dona Senhorinha was part of a weeklong meeting I attended in 2003 that gathered members and friends of Associação Respeita Januário, a nonprofit organization that Sandroni founded to support traditional musicians in the region. Dona Senhorinha and others from Tacaratu were there to watch the video of her being reunited with the sound of her youthful voice. Their presence changed the emotional tenor of the event. The intellectual register of researchers’ progress reports was eclipsed by the strong response from the Tacaratuenses upon hearing old melodies.

      Dona Senhorinha’s emotional response to the recordings was to be expected. She had moved from rural Tacaratu to the capital city of Recife and thus was remembering both the place where she used to live and the era. Rural-urban migration plays a part in painting a folkloric patina on rural areas and smaller, interior towns and cities. Thus, musical fieldworkers travel to the hinterlands, where they believe traditions still endure that have faded in more urban, industrialized areas. In Brazil, with its uneven economic development, recording projects such as the Mission of Folkloric Research have represented entire regions nostalgically as repositories of heritage and folklore.

      The northeastern interior region in particular has suffered extreme poverty, drought, and massive outflows of rural-urban

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