BRAZILIAN MUSIC AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS: - Elisabeth Blin

PROLOGUE: PERSONAL COMMENTS ABOUT COLONIALISM
Brazilian singer and Tropicalia leader Caetano Veloso (b.1942) quotes in his book
Tropical Truth and in one of his songs, the letter written on his arrival in Brazil by
explorer Pedro Vaz de Caminha to the King of Portugal, Manuel I, on May 1 st , 1500. 1
The Portuguese navigator describes the Brazilian land as being so fertile and green, that
“everything one plants in it, everything grows and flourishes.” He explains further:
“Arvoredo tanto, e tamanho, e tao basto, e de tanta folhagem, que nao se pode calcular.”
(The vastness of the tree-line and foliage is incalculable.)
This letter brings to mind of a brief passage quoted in M.L. King biography, where
the 1800s black American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, describes the natural wealth of
South-West Georgia:
“For a radius of a hundred miles about Albany stretched a great fertile land, luxuriant with forests of
pine, oak, ash, hickory and poplar, hot with the sun and damp with the rich black swampland; and
here, the cornerstone of the Cotton Kingdom was laid. 2”
This passage also echoes the comments of French anthropologist, Claude Levi-
Strauss (b.1908), during his 1941 visit to Rio de Janeiro. Arriving in the bay of
Guanabara, he remembered immediately the words of Columbus describing the New
World in 1498:
“The trees were so high that they seem to touch the sky; and, if I understand correctly, they never
loose their leaves; for I have seen them as fresh and green in November, as they are in May in Spain;
some even were in flower, while others bore fruit… Wherever I turned, I could hear the nightingale
singing, accompanied by thousands of birds of different species. 3 ”
1 Veloso 1997, Tropical Truth , A Story Of Music and Revolution inBrazil (Companhia das Letras, Sao
Paulo: First Da Capo Press, New York: Random House Inc. , 2003), 117
2 The Soul of Black Folks, quoted in Oates, Stephen B. 1982. Let The Trumpet Sound, The Life Of
Martin Luther King Jr .(New York: Harper and Row, publishers) 183
3 Claude Levi-Strauss 1958, Structural Anthropology (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 80
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