Samba: The Ancestral Heartbeat of Brazil
- Jun 13
- 7 min read
An evolving journey through memory, music, race, faith, and Carnival, told by the voices of the men and women who shaped the story of samba in Samba on Your Feet.
Dedicated to Juan Trasmonte
Updated on June 13, 2026 -- Haroldo Costa died in Rio de Janeiro this past December, at ninety-five. Actor, writer, the first Black actor to stand on the stage of the Theatro Municipal, author of fifteen books, judge of Carnivals, founder of the Teatro Experimental do Negro — and, above all of it, one of the great keepers of samba's history. When I filmed him, he was the historian. Now he is the history. He would not have minded the demotion. He spent his life arguing for it.
What he gave me, on camera, was an idea I have not been able to put down since.
He said the samba school is the book of a country that reads little. That in Brazil, a place where the printed page never reached everyone, the school took over the work the book could not do — it told the people their own history, in song and in procession, year after year, so that nothing essential would be lost. The parade is not decoration. It is a chapter. The escola de samba, he argued, narrates "a história da nossa história" — the history of our history — to people who would otherwise never read it.
And at the center of that idea stood a figure he named with great care: the griô.
The griot, in West Africa, is the one who remembers. He carries the genealogies, the wars, the harvests, the names of the dead, and he sings them back to the living so the village knows who it is. Costa saw the griot reborn on the avenida where the carnival paredes. The puxador — the singer who carries the school's song — is the griot. He stands before forty thousand people and sings the whole samba alone, first, before the drums, before the crowd answers him. He is, Costa said, the historian. He is the one through whom the story passes.
This is the thought that should change how you watch a Carnival. The thing tourists photograph as spectacle, Costa heard as testimony. Behind the feathers and the floats is an oral tradition doing exactly what oral traditions have always done — defending a people against forgetting.
But the part of his argument that has stayed with me most is the part about who actually carries it.
The Velha Guarda. The Old Guard. The elders of the school, who if they did not see it born were there near the beginning, and who hold in their bodies the whole life of the thing. Costa called them the greatest reference in samba — and then, in the same breath, said the truest and saddest thing in the film: that they are, unfortunately, forgotten. Esquecidos. Desconhecidos. Forgotten and unknown. The living archive, neglected by the very culture it sustains.
He believed we owed them reverence. That every sambista should, in his phrase, bow the head before them. Not nostalgia — reverence, the kind owed to a library you are about to lose.
I did not understand, when I was filming, that I was recording a man describing his own future.
Because Haroldo Costa has now joined them. The historian became the history; the man who named the griôs is now one of the names a griô must carry. When he died, another figure of the Carnival called him exactly that — a griot. The frame he spent his life building for others closed, gently, around him. There is no irony in it. There is only the thing he was always telling us: that this is how a culture survives, by passing the voice from the one who is leaving to the one who remains.
That is what a film is, when it works. Not a monument — Costa distrusted monuments. A workshop. A place the voice is kept and handed on.
He gave me his, and now I am handing it to you.
The samba school is the book of a country that reads little. The man who taught me that has gone to the Old Guard, where he always said the real history was kept. The least I can do — the least any of us can do — is refuse to let him be forgotten.
A man stands on a construction site in Rio, mixing cement, and to keep the dust out of his hair he wears a hard little bowler — a chapéu-coco. The other workers start calling him by the hat. Cartola. The name stuck for the rest of his life, longer than the buildings he helped raise.
His real name was Agenor.
So Far, The Argument. Now, the proof folded into a single life: Cartola (1908-1980).
Cartola was one of the founders of the form, one of those indispensable figure who shaped modern Samba. He was there at the beginning of the samba school as we know it; he wrote songs that are now load-bearing walls of Brazilian music. And for most of his life, the country that would later claim him as a treasure left him in poverty.
In Samba on your Feet Hermínio Bello de Carvalho (writer, producer, and music historian) describes a first encounter with Cartola in 1962. He had gone to write an article and did not yet know him personally — only the work. He found him at a hard stretch of his life. Cartola was living on someone's charity in an old house. He washed cars at night — the number that comes up is eleven cars a night — while his wife, Zica, cooked for extra money, sending food in tin marmitas to be sold to bus drivers down at Praça Mauá. According to Hermínio, "Her cooking was divine".
Now, hold that image against the one the world prefers: Carnival as spectacle, samba as the happy noise of a happy country. Here is the truth underneath it. The man who wrote "As Rosas Não Falam" was washing cars in the dark while his wife sold lunch to bus and taxi drivers to keep them both alive. The history did not protect its own. That is precisely why the history had to be kept in song — because nothing else was keeping it.
Cartola made his first record at sixty-five. Sixty-five! A founder of the genre, one of its supreme melodists, and the official world did not press his voice onto a disc until he was an old man. By sixty-eight he had made a second. The songs did not arrive late because they were written late. They arrived late because no one with the means had bothered to listen sooner.
And then there is the ring.
Herminio's memomories go further. The friends who used to gather at Cartola's house to play samba — each bringing a beer, a little food, a little money so Zica could cook — saw how things stood, and they did something about it. They opened a place where he could sing and actually earn: a house on the Rua da Carioca that took his name. Nobody expected it to become what it became. It turned into a phenomenon, a place people had to go. The legendary establishment was called Zicartola, the bar and restaurant founded by Cartola and Dona Zica in downtown Rio de Janeiro. It operated on the second floor of number 53 Rua da Carioca and became one of the most important samba venues of the 1960s, bringing together traditional sambistas and the emerging bossa nova generation. Paulinho da Viola is said to have made his debut there.
In fact, Zicartola was much more than a bar and restaurant. It was a cultural hub where artists such as Nelson Cavaquinho, Zé Kéti, Paulinho da Viola, and others performed, helping revive interest in samba at a critical moment in Brazilian musical history.
But the detail that stops me — the one no encyclopedia entry on samba will ever carry, because it could only come from someone who was in the room — is this. Cartola left instructions, in his will, alongside a request to Zica: that his sambista's ring should go to Paulinho da Viola the symbolic heir to Cartola’s legacy. Cartola had a deep affection and admiration for Paulinho, who was then one of the younger musicians that helped bridge the old guard of samba and the newer generation. Paulinho was also closely connected to Zicartola and the Mangueira tradition. The anel de sambista. The ring that marked him as one of the brotherhood.
Paulinho da Viola called the ring the greatest gift he had ever been given by a friend.
That is the whole of samba in one object. Not the feathers, not the Sambadrome, not the mulata-and-straw-hat postcard the marketing made of it. A plain ring, passed from a dying poet to a living one, carrying membership in a tradition the official country had spent decades pretending not to see. The griot does not leave an estate. He leaves the song, and the ring, and the name — handed to whoever will keep carrying them.
Cartola spent his life proving that Samba was the book the country didn't read until it was almost too late. He was the history that survived in song because it survived nowhere else. The least we can do now, is just listen to him.
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This article is based on interviews conducted for the documentary Samba on Your Feet (2005), featuring Paulo Barros, Haroldo Costa, Teresa Cristina, Caetano Veloso, Xangô da Mangueira, Tia Surica, Carlinhos de Jesus, Hermínio Bello de Carvalho, Mart’nália, and others.
This is an evolving story. I will continue to update it as new information, memories, and connections come to light. Future chapters will follow the life of Cartola, from the construction scaffolds to the sambista’s ring he willed to a friend, and will revisit the street Carnival that the dictatorship and the decades took away.
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