Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil

A study of the foundation of Brazilian popular music and its effect on the formation of national identity and cultural expression Hello, hello Brazil was the standard greeting Brazilian radio announcers of the 1930s used to welcome their audience into an expanding cultural marketplace. New genres like samba and repackaged older ones like choro served as the currency in this marketplace, minted in the capital in Rio de Janeiro and circulated nationally by the burgeoning recording and broadcasting industries. Bryan McCann chronicles the flourishing of Brazilian popular music between the 1920s and the 1950s. Through analysis of the competing projects of composers, producers, bureaucrats, and fans, he shows that Brazilians alternately envisioned popular music as the foundation of a unified national culture and used it as a tool to probe divisions of race and region.