River of Tears

"River of Tears" is the first ethnography of Brazilian country music, one of the most popular genres in Brazil and least-known outside it. Beginning in the mid-1980s, various forms of rural music burst onto Brazil's national music scene. Commercial musical duos practicing musica sertaneja reached beyond their base in Brazil's Central-Southern region to become national bestsellers. Rodeo events revolving around country music came to rival soccer matches in attendance. A revival of folkloric rural music called musica caipira, heralded as musica sertaneja's ancestor, took shape, particularly in the Central-Southern state of Sao Paulo. All the while, large numbers of Brazilians in the Central-South were moving to cities, claiming as they did so that their Brazil was first and foremost a rural nation. Since 1998, Alexander Sebastian Dent has conducted research in the state of Sao Paulo, mostly in the city of Campinas, interviewing and spending time with Brazilians associated with rural music, from listeners, musicians, and songwriters to journalists, record-company owners, and radio hosts. Drawing on that research, Dent not only describes the forms, production, and reception of Brazilian rural music. He also explains why the genre experienced such tremendous growth at a particular historical moment, as Brazil transitioned from dictatorship to a period of intense neoliberal economic and social reform. Dent argues that rural genres address a widespread social anxiety that change has been too radical and too fast. In defining their music as rural, Brazil's country musicians - whose music is produced and circulates in cities - mean that their lyrics criticize an increasingly inescapable urban life characterized by suppressed emotions and an inattentiveness to the past. They sing of loss of love, of life in the countryside, and of man's connections to the natural world.