08/25/2024 – 13:38
Alongside Pixinguinha, the musician was part of a group that toured presenting MPB in Europe in the 1920s. The researcher laments that his legacy is still not well recognized. Ernesto Joaquim Maria dos Santos, better known as Donga (1890-1974), was 26 years old when he recorded the song Pelo Telefone. On November 27, 1916, the song was registered under number 3,295 with the Copyright Department of the National Library in Rio de Janeiro. It would go down in history as the first recorded samba in history.
Donga signed as the author of the composition. Later, he would add the name of journalist and composer Mauro de Almeida (1882-1956) as a partner. However, by all indications, Pelo Telefone was a collective creation of the attendees of a famous candomblé temple in Praça Onze, in Rio. When challenged on the subject, Donga would often prevaricate, arguing that “music is like a bird, it belongs to whoever catches it first.”
For musician Alberto Tsuyoshi Ikeda, professor at the University of São Paulo (USP) and consultant for the Kaapora Chair: Cultural and Ethnic Diversity in Brazilian Society, at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), the recording of Pelo Telefone was an act of “opportunism, of cleverness” by Donga, who was a “restless natural leader” of the samba artists in that context.
Although it has become a landmark of MPB, recognized by experts and celebrated by institutions — the National Library itself dedicated an exhibition to the theme when the recording turned 100, in 2016 —, today it is understood that there were other sambas recorded previously, just with less fanfare, less success and reduced importance.
“It wasn’t the first samba recorded, but it was the first successful samba,” says journalist, writer and music historian Rodrigo Faour, author of, among other books, História da Música Popular Brasileira Sem Preconceitos[History of Brazilian Popular Music Without Prejudice]. “He understood that he needed to make the recording of Pelo telefone an event. So he planned everything very well. He took the improvised verses and folkloric motifs of this song and asked a prestigious journalist, Mauro de Almeida, to organize them, and went to the National Library to register it.”
Faour says that there were “many protests from other composers who felt wronged” for not being listed as the authors of the song. However, Donga’s “greatest asset” “was drawing attention to this new musical genre”. Samba “quickly caught on with everyone”. “The song became popular”, says the historian.
Samba as an icon of Brazilianness
Recording the samba was not the only highlight of Donga’s career, of course. He created the Donga-Pixinguinha Typical Orchestra with Alfredo da Rocha Vianna Filho (1897-1973), Pixinguinha. In 1919, with his partner and six other musicians, he organized the group Oito Batutas, which toured Europe in the 1920s, enchanting audiences with the Brazilian way of making music.
In the book-interview Blaise Cendrars vous parle, published in 1952, the French-Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961) defines Donga as endowed with “a constant good humor and an irresistible grace”. “He had the genius of popular music”, he praises.
The fact is that Pelo Telefone and, later, Oito Batutas were essential in forging samba as the country’s great iconic musical genre. Anthropologist Hermano Vianna explains in his book O Mistério do Samba that the style established itself as Brazil’s official rhythm within the nationalization and modernization project undertaken by the government of President Getúlio Vargas (1882-1954) from the 1930s onwards, with the support of intellectuals who extolled the legacy of modernism. Thus, samba supplanted country music as the musical genre for which Brazil would become globally known. The urban beat the rural.
Vargas supported Carnival as a tool of soft power. And illustrious foreigners, such as the American businessman and film producer Walt Disney (1901-1966), began to be taken to see Rio’s samba schools.
“The victory of samba was also the victory of a project to nationalize Brazilian society. Brazil emerged from the Estado Novo with praise (at least in ideology) for national miscegenation. […]. In popular music, Brazil has since been the Kingdom of Samba”, writes Vianna.
In 1940, Donga recorded nine compositions on the album Native Brazilian Music, which was organized and conducted by two maestros, the Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) and the British Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977), and released in the United States. For musician, composer and art director Bruno Leo Ribeiro, from the podcast Silêncio no Estúdio, this may have opened the doors of the American cultural market to Brazilian works — which was later consolidated with bossa nova.
“Holy Trinity” of MPB
The son of a bricklayer who played the euphonium in his spare time and a mother of a saint who sang folk songs and loved to throw parties, Donga grew up in an extremely musical, poor and religiously syncretic environment in Rio. And this shaped his artistic career.
Ikeda recalls that, organized by priestesses, these Candomblé sites, also called macumba in Rio, functioned as a “circuit of multicultural environments, which provided a musical effervescence”. “They were spaces for living and for reconciling religious activities with secular-festive gatherings”, analyzes the professor.
Composer Livio Tragtenberg, former professor at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) and creator of the São Paulo Street Musicians Orchestra, places Donga as a member of the “most important triad of black Carioca music”, alongside Pixinguinha and João da Bahiana (1887-1974).
He points out that the recording of Pelo Telefone took place less than 30 years after the Lei Áurea officially freed slaves in Brazil, on May 13, 1888. “We are talking about a historical context that was still very turbulent in Rio. And samba is the first gesture of cultural affirmation by black people in the context of Brazilian music. It breaks with that very Europeanized culture that still existed,” Tragtenberg analyzes.
“His legacy was that of being one of the pioneers of samba and also of exercising a kind of leadership, giving advice and establishing important contacts with high society figures of the time,” says Faour. “Although Pixinguinha was the most talented musician in the group, he was sometimes a bit disorganized with the more bureaucratic side of things, which is why Donga was fundamental in this area.”
“He is one of those pioneers that we always need to remember. Brazil has a certain difficulty in keeping its archives alive. We end up remembering artists with more commercial success,” says Ribeiro. “The legacy he leaves is that he was one of the first to open the door for samba to evolve. He wrote marchinhas, maxixe and samba. All of this evolved into an amalgam and mixed together to become the samba we know today. He was fundamental in getting us to where we are today.”
Musician Ikeda laments that there is still a lack of academic work that recognizes Donga’s legacy. “He was a composer, an instrumentalist who played the guitar, cavaquinho and percussion, and was part of the divine trinity that gave rise to samba. [com Pixinguinha e João da Bahiana]has always had a leadership style. He really needs to be recognized,” he argues. “There is still a lack of research to fully understand the importance of Donga in those early days of Brazilian music.”
Despite the greatness of his career and the importance he had for Brazilian music, Donga faced difficulties towards the end of his life. A retired court officer, he ended up being taken in by the Retiro dos Artistas — an institution that shelters elderly artists with financial problems. Sick and with very poor vision, he died on August 25, 1974. His music, recorded and immortalized since 1916, remains.
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