Hearing Brazil: chapter 3, "Vissungo “Songs of the Earth,”: A Vanishing Tradition of the Serro Frio

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Rare recordings of vissungo (songs) to accompany the book Hearing Brazil: Music and Histories in Minas Gerais, chapter III: "Vissungo: “Songs of the Earth,” a vanishing tradition of the Serro Frio," by Jonathon Grasse (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) The original acetate disk recordings of these songs are held in the Library of Congress, American Folklife Center's Luis Heitor Corrêa de Azevedo and E. Nogueira França Brazil Collection. Digitization was requested for this project by the book's author, Jonathon Grasse, and the recordings here appear courtesy of the American Folklife Center. The video features singer Joaquim Caetano de Almeida, recorded by Azevedo and França in Diamantina, MG during February, 1944. He performs ten untitled vissungo, with timings ranging from fourteen seconds to nearly 1 ½ minutes. The captioned photographs, taken in the 1880s by Marc Ferrez, depict various nineteenth-century mining scenes in Minas Gerais, Brazil. They are not directly correlated to the vissungo song tradition, and merely offer visual background to the time and some of the places where vissungo was performed.
Posted June 12, 2022
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