walking upstream…
Dorival Caymmi
Dorival Caymmi
sourcesVeja, 1972 (Tárik de Souza) — "Em busca do mais simples" (Caymmi on his guitar training and Bahian roots) · Jornal da Tarde, 1984 (Sérgio Vaz) — "A obra admirável e extraordinária de Dorival Caymmi" (Canhoto method corroboration) · Sesc São Paulo, 2013 (Herbert Carvalho) — "O compositor da praia e do mar" (Canhoto method corroboration) · Stella Caymmi, PUC-Rio master's thesis, 2006 — "O portador inesperado" (Ary Barroso relationship, guitar-sound quotes)
In 1938, a young clerk from Salvador sent a song called "O Que É Que a Baiana Tem?" to be sung by Carmen Miranda in the film Banana da Terra, displacing a costlier number by the established Ary Barroso to get it there. The song made Miranda's Hollywood career and Caymmi's own, launching him onto Rio radio that June. He had taught himself guitar from a single published method book and kept teaching himself everything else — friends warned that formal study would cost him his instinct, so he stayed the autodidact, building the "canção praieira" out of fishing-village rhythms, capoeira's berimbau pulse, and street samba absorbed as a boy in Bahia. He died in Rio in 2008, having spent seventy years turning a self-taught, deliberately imperfect guitar into the sound of one specific coast.
the sound in question
1938
O Que É Que a Baiana Tem?Dorival Caymmi
walk the tributaries ↓
Américo Jacomino "Canhoto"1910s-20s · Choro / Waltz
Caymmi's entire guitar education was one book. Asked in 1972 what his formal training amounted to, he didn't hedge: "Fiquei exatamente no mínimo: o método Canhoto e umas posições que meu tio Alcides 'Ceci' Soares... me ensinou" — I stayed at the bare minimum, the Canhoto method and a few positions my uncle taught me. Américo Jacomino, nicknamed Canhoto for playing a guitar strung for a right-hander, had published Brazil's best-known guitar primer a decade earlier. Working through it alone in Salvador, the teenage Caymmi came out reaching past the tidy "acorde perfeito" for something stranger.
listen: upstream & here
1926
Abismo de RosasAmérico Jacomino "Canhoto"
1954
Rosa MorenaDorival Caymmi
listen forCanhoto's 1926 recording of "Abismo de Rosas" never lets a chord sit still — his hand keeps sliding voicings sideways instead of resolving them cleanly, restless against the era's parlor-guitar norms. Put on Caymmi's "Rosa Morena" (1954) and the same instinct is audible, translated: the single guitar under his voice keeps nudging chords off their square positions, the harmonic equivalent of the "som harmônico diferente, esquisito" he said he was chasing. Neither man is singing about a fisherman here — this is guitar touch passed hand to hand, not repertoire.
Ary Barroso1930s-40s · Samba-exaltação / Samba / Choro
Caymmi knew Barroso's songs before he knew the man — as a teenager in Salvador, he heard them via records by Carmen Miranda and Francisco Alves. In 1938 Caymmi's own "O Que É Que a Baiana Tem?" bumped a pricier Barroso number out of the film Banana da Terra, launching the newcomer's career instead. "Eu soube depois e fiquei embaraçado, porque era o extremo, eu, um anônimo, e Ary Barroso, a glória da música popular," Caymmi recalled — embarrassed at his own sudden fame beside Barroso's. Twenty years later, rivalry gave way to Um Interpreta o Outro (1958), a full album of each singing the other's songs.
listen: upstream & heresource: Enciclopédia Itaú Cultural — Dorival Caymmi (bio, Canhoto guitar method, Ary Barroso connection) ↗
1938
Na Baixa do SapateiroAry Barroso
1958
Na Baixa do SapateiroDorival Caymmi
listen forBarroso's own 1938 recording of "Na Baixa do Sapateiro" moves at a brassy exaltação clip, piano rolling under a big, declamatory vocal built to fill a radio studio. Caymmi's 1958 version of the same song, cut for their duet album, strips that down to voice and a spare guitar figure, unhurried where Barroso pushes forward — the difference between singing a country and singing one street corner in it, a single melody carrying two different ideas of Brazilian song.