Alexander Sebastian Dent is Associate Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University.

River of Tears

COUNTRY MUSIC, MEMORY, AND MODERNITY IN BRAZILBy ALEXANDER SEBASTIAN DENT

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2009 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4520-6

Contents

Preface………………………………………………………………………………………ixAcknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………….xiIntroduction: Rural Music, Intimacy, and Memory…………………………………………………..11 What Counts as “Country”? Rural Performativity in the Twentieth Century……………………………292 Country Brothers: Kinship as Chronotope………………………………………………………..573 Mixture, Sadness, and Intimacy in the Brazilian Musical Field…………………………………….834 Hick Dialogics: Experiencing the Play of Rural Genres……………………………………………1085 Teleologies of Rural Disappearance: Interpreting Rural Music……………………………………..1366 Digital Droplets and Analogue Flames: The Circulatory Matrices of Brazilian Country…………………1627 Producing Rural Locality……………………………………………………………………..1868 Hicks of the World: The Country Cosmopolitan……………………………………………………211Conclusion: Postauthoritarian Memory and Rurality…………………………………………………239Notes………………………………………………………………………………………..251Musical Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………267Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………….269Index………………………………………………………………………………………..285

Chapter One

What Counts as “Country”?

RURAL PERFORMATIVITY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The “Jeca theme” from a song called “The Sadness of Armadillo Joe” seeds our examination of rural genres and allows us to lay out rurality’s approach to subjectivity. This theme reworks itself in Central-Southern rural “variations” (Lvi-Strauss 1969) throughout the twentieth century. The Jeca theme and variations’ most important attribute is that the singing, playing, and listening subject separates a debased urban present from an idealized rural past and then uses that rural past as a means to reprimand the present. This sounds simple enough.

However, the dynamics of this reprimand are not without complication for several reasons. First, it is only one part of Joe that longs for a time in which he was whole, “off in those hills.” In the present, the protagonist is both geographically and temporally cut off from the moment in which he felt intact. In a fragmented “now,” the singer is divided, living partially, longing for completion back then, off there. At the beginning of the twentieth century, rural song-texts grieved for the impossibility of a return to there and then by way of imagery from nature, sometimes joining this with the impossibility of returning to a romantic love that had gone wrong. By the end of the century, romantic love comes to play an increasingly important role, as the space in these songs once occupied by cows, birds, fish, and rivers fills with man’s unbridled passions. This chapter nonetheless argues that throughout this period, the pith of musically instantiated rurality remains consistent.

The Jeca Theme

This continuity can be seen from an analysis of the Jeca theme, together with its histories. Reading these histories, in turn, reveals the way in which rurality relates the past to the present. So, to begin: On May 24, 1918, sometime dentist, police scribe, and music-store owner Angelino de Oliveira premiered the song in question. It would become one of the most famous rural songs in the history of Brazilian music-a tune current ten-string guitar player, music critic, and novelist Paulo Freire calls the Central-Southern rural “hymn and most representative song” (Freire 1996, 15). In “The Sadness of Armadillo Joe” (“Tristezas do Jeca”-also translatable simply as “Jeca’s Sadness”), Oliveira set out to write candidly of the difficult conditions of the hillbilly without being maudlin. In Oliveira’s view, the basic point was that the song’s protagonist had been forced to move away from where he was born.

In the song, Jeca misses the place he still thinks of as home, where nature does the nurturing. He wants to go back.

I was born off in those hills In a hut, cradled by the ground.

At the same time as Jeca wants to return, however, he knows full well that he cannot. Jeca’s absorption in his grief dominates the song and the mood it establishes. As with all Central-Southern rural musical song-texts, the protagonist cries, musically, because he finds himself involuntarily separated from something he once lived close to, in this case, nature and home, joined. Jeca displays his past proximity to a natural home through a description of the house of his youth. The moonlight comes through openings in the roof. The ground “cradles” sleepers. One awakens, not to an alarm clock or to sounds from some bustling street, but to the song of birds that the porous structure invites inside:

Our simple house so full of holes, And lit by moonlight. And when dawn came, There, in the forest, the songbirds Started the morning’s sounds.

Back in the good old days, Jeca’s house did not maintain strict boundaries between man and nature, but allowed its residents to live practically out-of-doors. Each day, Jeca went to sleep and woke up in a home that was of the forest.

But those days are gone. And Jeca’s resultant sadness relates both to the passage of time and to his movement in physical space. Jeca is older now and has had to leave those distant hills along with his youth. And it is not only time and space that provide the metrics for this movement, but also Jeca’s incumbent sense of self. As mentioned, in the present, part of him still resides off in those hills where he was once whole, while the other half lives here, in a diminished now. As he bemoans his inability to return to those hills, he simultaneously longs for the countryside, the past, and a sense of completeness predicated in part upon ignorance of the outside world; that forest was all he knew. In this pining, he’s aiming for an unreachable target, one that is inaccessible, not only because the past is closed to him, but because to return to childish years would mean relinquishing the present. The present is, necessarily, a loss, but one that must be held on to because to go back is a loss also. Jeca cannot return, not only because the past has passed, but also because the past is a childish place, and he must now live in a grown-up world. So, despite its not being a manly thing to do, Jeca weeps. He weeps because he cannot go back, because he should not go back, and because he nonetheless wants to go back. Add to this the fact that Jeca is unable to govern his emotions because his countryness makes him a more “natural,” and hence more emotional, man, and you have a perfect storm of tears.

Oliveira felt that most contemporaneous rural music approached Jeca’s sadness simply by rendering some rural domestic disaster in lyrics. But for Oliveira, the laundry lists of calamities these tunes contained failed to capture the underlying grief of rural experience. He wished instead to render the rural protagonist’s deep-seated melancholy. Jeca’s feelings were not only the result of drought, hunger, poverty, or his cheatin’ love. These events were surely capable of catalyzing Jeca’s grief, but they did not encompass it. The recitation of difficult occurrences did little to explain what Jeca felt in his innermost self, whereas Oliveira hoped his song would do precisely that. “Jeca’s Sadness” therefore contains no events whatsoever, instead proffering an abstract cosmology of Jeca. Indeed, the lack of specificity of reference to the past is part of the point of this song, and part of the point of Brazilian rurality itself. This is not a tune filled with specific references which place Jeca’s past precisely. Rather, the song evokes a sense of the past that is rigorously nonspecific, and in that nonspecificity, it evokes a past that is easily appropriable. That the past to which Jeca points may be said never to have existed is part of the point.

Throughout, music plays a crucial role in Jeca’s state of mind and in his ability to conjure bygone days that are simultaneously from nowhere and everywhere. For Oliveira’s Jeca, singing and playing provide both an occasion and conveyance for his deep-seated melancholy. The sadness of having once been embraced by nature and then forced to leave it finds unique expression in song. Jeca, who uses his viola to sing his “longing,” tells us:

I can’t sing no more. Because when Jeca sings You wanna cry. And the tears you cry then Slowly flow away- Like water, t’ the sea.

As in all Central-Southern rural music, Oliveira fuses singing and playing the viola with grief itself. The singing and playing of the song both channel the performer’s grief and elicit grief in kind in those who hear it; Jeca’s melody makes him cry, and listeners cry while listening. The song thus simultaneously mediates bodily and intellectual, individual and social aspects of grief (see Leavitt 1996, 531). This makes maintaining musical coherence throughout the song more difficult. Jeca is so sad that the song only just manages to stay on track; grief threatens to overwhelm him and send the music into the domain of mere weeping.

Sonically channeling the grief of both performer and audience does not dissipate that grief, sending it to a kind of emotional “ground” like an errant electrical charge. Rather, the physical manifestation of inner sadness in the form of the hick’s tears integrates him with nature once again. Singing and playing, and their incumbent tearfulness, embed Jeca in cyclical hydraulic processes. The tears listeners and singers cry in response to the song form rivers, leading, eventually, to the ocean. One day, they’ll fall again as rain. At the same time as water emerges from eyes, each note from the song forms a tear. So the music drips like water, as falling tears play the melody of the song. The countryside and its natural attributes map the emotional topography, or musically instantiated “structure of feeling,” in which grief temporarily reintegrates those who perform and listen to rural music with nature and with their pasts. “Structure of feeling” here conveys the link between a way of shaping and responding to individual experience on the one hand, and a certain mode of cultural production writ large on the other (R. Williams 1977, 128-35). And as Raymond Williams noted, the opposition between the country and the city provides a vocabulary for a set of “historical ideas” that do not necessarily reference a specific time and place. This structure of feeling reveals the way in which an “experience finds material which gives body to the thoughts” (R. Williams 1973, 291).

Rural music historian and violeiro Paulo Freire’s historical book on rural music, in which he praises and historicizes “Jeca’s Sadness,” draws its title from the first line of the song. I Was Born off in Those Hills (Freire 1996) seeks to fix Brazilian rurality’s past by ascribing a seedlike quality to this tune, describing its momentum-the way it carries emotional force across time and space. For Freire, it is the conveyance of sadness in the song that promises, albeit temporarily, to allow listeners and singers to touch their long-lost homes. The song builds a bridge, but it calls attention to the fact that it builds a bridge that it must soon tear down. Musicality thus mediates time and space, fusing fragmented portions of subjectivity together, as it signals the very impermanence of that fusion. Freire’s analysis of the song in print (as we shall see below, he provides other details onstage) begins with the night of its first rendition. After Oliveira played it for friends at his local bar in Botucatu, we read that there was silence. Apparently the song did not fit into an immediately recognizable pattern of listener response. People seemed, at first, unsure of what they had heard and required a few moments to understand their own reactions. Only after a few seconds did their silence turn to deafening applause. In the course of the evening, those present requested the song six more times. In Freire’s telling, from its first rendition, “Jeca’s Sadness” carried in its very melody and words the ability to generate a desire for its repetition. The audience felt compelled to keep feeling sad again. The hurt was so good.

Part of this pleasurable pain emerges from Jeca’s appeals to his audience through the symbols of the caipira, the viola, and the song itself:

With this viola I sing, and cry, truthfully And each tune is like a piece of longing.

And this sadness and longing carry with them a sense of powerlessness. The narrator seems trapped. As Jeca would have it:

I want to tell you Of my suffering and my pain. I am like the songbird, Who can only sing of sadness From his branch.

Fully expressing this powerlessness contributed to the song’s force. But somehow confessing the sense of being trapped, which lies at the center of Jeca’s predicament, made the song comforting. And this is another important element of Jeca’s theme. For its audience on that night in Botucatu, the song had a simultaneously soothing and saddening effect, one that not only perfectly captured Jeca’s sense of imprisonment (Freire 1996, 22), but also elicited that same feeling in listeners. They became Jeca, together.

The effects of the song were not limited to Oliveira’s bar-friends in Botucatu, Freire’s story goes. Freire continues with tales in which Oliveira’s singing and crying hick transcended both geopolitical boundaries and, on one occasion at least, violence. One year after its premiere in 1919, Freire writes, only somewhat tongue in cheek, the police ordered the pit orchestra to play the song during a riot at a theater in the small interior town of Barretos, Su Paulo. The rioters stopped in their tracks, and when the music ended, they quietly left the theater. Even when it was arranged for orchestra and thus stripped of its originary rural instrumentation and singing styles, Jeca’s sadness still evoked the essence of Brazil abroad. In the 1930s, for example, one particularly homesick Brazilian journalist reportedly stepped off a train in a hamlet in Russia and was amazed to hear Jeca’s sonic tears emerging from a bar (Freire 1996). He would later recount that that sound had transported him home, melting the ice and snow. More widespread evidence of the song’s significance lies in its having been used by radio stations in Germany, Holland, and the United Kingdom to begin transmissions concerning Brazil in the years before the Second World War. In this way, Freire establishes the extent to which this rural song perfectly hit the target of Central-Southern rural grief in such a way that listeners across time and space could not help but recognize it as embodying Brazil itself.

But who was Jeca? Why was he so sad? And how did this song so perfectly capture his plight? At the moment in which Oliveira composed his tune, “Jeca” was the stereotypical name for a Central-Southern hill billy, the “Joe Sixpack” of So Paulo’s interior in the early twentieth century. And the caipira was contested terrain in early twentieth-century Brazil. Some had it that he was a painful reminder of how far there was left to go before arriving at First World status (Lobato 1998). Others had him as a tragic-comic genius whose simplicity allowed him to see more clearly than his ostensibly sophisticated but overconfident urban counterparts (Pires 1927, 1985). What is clear is that then, as now, the rural subject was a site where the transformations of Brazilian society could be interpreted and enacted by way of notions of country and city. Contrasting perspectives on Jeca went along with differing understandings of the former’s relation to the latter and with prescriptions for how that relation, and along with it, Brazil’s future, ought to be handled. Should the countryside modernize and all traces of the past be done away with, in particular, degenerate hillbillies? Or should city-dwellers learn a thing or two from their country cousins about how to do things the old-fashioned way, appreciating hick wisdom and preserving the backcountry in the bargain? Part and parcel of this back-and-forth involved commentary on modes of materially conceived production. Should small family farms be preserved, or should industrialization and wholesale monocrop agriculture take over? Could the two modes coexist?

(Continues…)

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