The following list, which I translated below, comes from the Portal Geledés (via a Brazilian news site). The songs below demonstrate the beginnings of samba and how it progressed over the first few decades. If you’d like to further your musical understanding of samba’s origins, I suggest this two-disc album. For more samba posts in this blog, go here, and for a good samba documentary (no subtitles, sorry), click this.

___

“Pelo Telefone” (1917, lyrics), by Donga and Mauro de Almeida

The first composition registered as samba, it has since become something of a controversy – for many researchers it isn’t even samba, but rather a disguised maxixe. It’s most probable that the song came out of a ‘drum’ circle, with several participants improvising verses and melodies. Those who would have participated in this meeting, at the famous home of Tia Ciata, in the then-Praça…