Cangoma Calling Spirits and Rhythms of Freedom in Brazilian Jongo Slavery Songs
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Cangoma Calling Spirits and Rhythms of Freedom in Brazilian Jongo Slavery Songs Cangoma Calling Spirits and Rhythms of Freedom in Brazilian Jongo Slavery Songs Edited by Pedro Meira Monteiro Michael Stone luso-asio-afro-brazilian studies & theory 3 Editor Victor K. Mendes, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Associate Editor Gina M. Reis, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Editorial Board Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University Anna M. Klobucka, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Pedro Meira Monteiro, Princeton University João Cezar de Castro Rocha, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro Phillip Rothwell, Rutgers University, New Brunswick Miguel Tamen, Universidade de Lisboa Claire Williams, University of Oxford Cover Design Inês Sena, Lisbon © 2013 The Authors We are thankful to the Centro de Pesquisa em História Social da Cultura (Cecult) and the Arquivo Edgar Leuenroth (AEL) at Unicamp for permission to reproduce the images in this book including the cover image. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cangoma calling : spirits and rhythms of freedom in Brazilian jongo slavery songs / edited by Pedro Meira Monteiro ; Michael Stone. pages ; cm. -- (Luso-Asio-Afro-Brazilian studies & theory ; 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-9814580-2-1 (alk. paper) 1. Jongos (Music)--History and criticism. 2. Blacks--Brazil--Music--History and criticism. 3. Music--Social aspects--Brazil. I. Monteiro, Pedro Meira. II. Stone, Michael. ML3575.B7C25 2013 781.62’96981--dc23 2012012085 Table of Contents Preface: A (Knotted) Stitch in Time, Weaving Connections Between Collections 7 Gage Averill Introduction: Jongos, the Creativity of the Enslaved and Beyond 11 Pedro Meira Monteiro and Michael Stone A Marvelous Journey 19 Stanley Stein Vassouras and the Sounds of Captivity in Southeast Brazil 25 Silvia Hunold Lara Memory Hanging by a Wire: Stanley J. Stein’s Historical Recordings 35 Gustavo Pacheco Like Forest Hardwoods: Jongueiros Cumba in the Central-African Slave Quarters 49 Robert W. Slenes “I Come from Afar, I Come Digging”: Kongo and Near-Kongo Metaphors in Jongo Lyrics 65 Robert W. Slenes Jongo, Recalling History 77 Hebe Mattos and Martha Abreu “As Rewarding as it Will be Fun”: Mapping the History and Legacy of Barbara and Stanley Stein’s Journey 89 Jorge L. Giovannetti “Sonorous Vestiges”: Stanley Stein’s Brazilian Recordings in Hemispheric Perspective 99 Kenneth Bilby Jongos: Bodies and Spirits 107 Arcadio Díaz Quiñones Resisting the Siren Song: The Shift from Folklore to Cultural History in Brazil 115 Pedro Meira Monteiro Sounds Like Jongos (New World Music) and the Changing Same 121 Michael Stone Lyrics 133 Maps and Photographs 161 Notes 175 Works Cited 197 Index 215 Contributors 219 Preface: A (Knotted) Stitch in Time, Weaving Connections Between Collections Gage Averill In reading through the various chapters of this book, I experienced many moments of connection and recognition. A decade ago, I had been asked to curate, edit, and annotate a sizeable collection of recordings (1,500 audio recordings plus films) produced by Alan Lomax in Haiti in the mid-1930s, and I finished this project in late 2009. Around the same time, I was made aware of the Stanley Stein collection of “lost” recordings of pontos/jongos and other music from Brazil, a small but still significant collection. I discov- ered that there were interesting intersections between these two projects. Both Stein and Lomax had corresponded with the venerable anthro- pologist of African American culture, Melville Herskovits, and both had gone to their respective destinations (a decade apart) armed with a list of contacts and suggestions for making recordings. Like Herskovits, both were amply assisted by their partners. For both Stein and Lomax, these were early formative encounters in what were to become brilliant careers: for Lomax as a musical folklorist, analyst, and popularizer of vernacular music, and for Stein as a renowned scholar and founder of the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton. Most importantly for this project, both men made recordings that remained out of the public eye for many decades and only much later came back into circulation. The disappearance of these collections resulted from two very dif- ferent sets of circumstances. For Stein, the wire recordings he had made were used to transcribe jongo lyrics for a chapter of his book and were otherwise thought to be of little interest, and they sat in a cabinet in his office for decades. Alan Lomax came back to the US from Haiti to assume CANGOMA CALLING the pressing duties of Director of the Archive of American Folk Song; he continued his work recording and popularizing American folk music, and donated his Haitian collection to the Library of Congress, where it sat for sixty years. A book on Haitian music soon came out by the folklorist and novelist Harold Courlander (who had been in Haiti during some of Lomax’s five months there), which included transcriptions of songs and song lyrics (Haiti Singing). Perhaps Lomax felt that his collection had been superseded? In any case, he eventually came to think that the recordings, which had been made on 10” and 12” aluminum disks, were too flawed from the perspective of acoustics to find a ready public. Courlander, mean- while, published a set of four LP recordings of Haitian music in the 1950s on Moses Asch’s Folkways Records (Folkways Ethnic Library) (Music of Haiti and Haitian Piano). As Kenneth Bilby points out in this volume, there are also some striking similarities between some of the rhetorical strategies of the jongo pontos and those in certain genres of Haitian song that Alan Lomax recorded, nota- bly in the use of allusive, critical language that has to be “untied”… language 8 that is “masked” or hidden. To voye pwen (throw a point) is one of the most powerful musical gestures available to a Haitian singer, and it can be used to provoke a deity or a human target. In his intricate linguistic analysis in this volume, Robert W. Slenes characterizes the Central African metaphors of binding and untying that result in the use of the term “pontos” (“knotted stitches” or “points”) for this form of challenge song. As I once phrased it, “it is in possessing the semiotic power (‘the key’) to unlock the meanings of the pwen that the audience takes such delight” (Averill 16). To find the same allusive language in song—categorized by a similar terminology—in the slave songs of Brazil is to come face to face with the shared Central Afri- can cultural inheritance mobilized by similar histories of oppression. For Alan Lomax, of course, the recording was the principal object of his work. He wanted to preserve the voices of those at the margins in order to create an alternative oral history of mankind and to empower the power- less through access to the means to be heard, especially through media. Although he documented his recordings and sometimes wrote about them, his focus was always on the recordings themselves. For Stanley Stein and his wife, Barbara Hadley Stein—even though they were aware of the work of Alan Lomax and his father, John, and had, as Jorge L. Giovan- netti points out in this volume, read John Lomax’s Adventures of a Ballad SPIRITS AND RHYTHMS OF FREEDOM IN BRAZILIAN JONGO SLAVERY SONGS Hunter—the recordings were afterthoughts and ancillary to the core work of understanding the history, economics and social structure of plantation life in Vassouras, Brazil. Nevertheless, Stein’s interest in ethnography and in audio documentation flowed from his desire to understand the human drama that underlay the slave system: the roles played by, and the experi- ences of, both slaves and masters. And so he was remarkably open to con- tributions from oral history and oral documentary evidence. In fact, when Stein expresses his desire to use the “magic of technology and memory” to “capture … the voices of the oppressed, and their memory,” he sounds very much like Alan Lomax and his project of “cultural equity.” And it is the voices recorded, not just the transcriptions of lyrics on the page, that resonate with such power after all these years. Of course, these voices were physically produced by vibrations of the vocal folds of the sing- ers (or in the vibrations of instruments articulated by human movement) and their traces carry the emotional content of the singer, something to which we can react with empathy and with recognition. Preserved as elec- tromagnetic variations on a wire, they come back to us sixty years later to vibrate our eardrums, connecting us physically, and reminding us of our 9 shared humanity. Slavery was built upon a denial of the humanity of both its victims and its perpetrators, but those who sang slave songs for Stanley Stein’s wire recorder (at least one of whom was a former slave) reach out to touch contemporary audiences with the profound humanity and the lay- ered and complex reflections on a predicament unique to a people who had had so much denied. And in them we hear the expressive strategies of those living as slaves, as they coped, criticized, and celebrated. Finally, both collections have arrived in the present moment to be dis- seminated, interpreted, compared to other repertories, debated, dissected, and to flow back into community musical practice as artists continue to perform or seek to revive historical expressive practices. And here, my own work and that of my team parallels the work of Gustavo Pacheco and the editors and contributors to this volume. Coming to understand deeply the context (people, locations, culture, language, politics, etc.) of the record- ings requires patient and disciplined detective work, sensitive translation, lots of historical cross-checking, and, indeed, some imagination. We are living in what certainly should be an archival golden era.