River of Tears: Country Music, Memory, and Modernity in Brazil
Alexander Sebastian Dent
2009, Duke University Press
297 pages
THIS passionate and ear-opening examination of Brazilian country music will be required reading for musicologists, but should also be high on the score for social scientists interested in the ethnography of Brazil in the neoliberal era. By exploring the evolution of música sertaneja in Brazil’s post-authoritarian period, Dent has provided a tuneful insight into the role of the rural in a rapidly changing society. Above all, he considers why this genre – so well known in Brazil itself, yet little-known beyond – experienced a crescendo of growth as the country moved from the discordance of authoritarian rule to the cacophony of democratisation against a backdrop of neoliberal reform. In an argument that we will all identify with, Dent suggests that rural genres reflected widespread unease that change was too radical and too fast, resulting in an often unwelcome urban transformation. As a result, Brazil’s country musicians evoked a “river of tears” flowing through a landscape of loss. – GJ
