NRR Project: 'O Que e que a Bahiana tem’ (1939)

 

NRR Project: ‘O Que e que a Bahiana tem’

Performed by Carmen Miranda and Bando de Lua

Recorded December 1939

3:17

Carmen Miranda (1909-1955) persists in our collective imagination as “the lady in the tutti-frutti hat,” the exuberant Brazilian songstress whose outrageous outfits were her trademark.

There are two excellent explanatory essays on her at the National Recording Registry – one byKathyrn Bishop-Sanchez, here; and one by Cary O’Dell, here. I can only add a bit myself.

She released her first album in 1930. She was already popular in Brazil when she recorded this song in 1938. It’s from her fifth film, Banana di Terra. The song took off and she recorded it in New York in December of that year.

She was an immediate hit. She dressed in an approximation of the wardrobe of the Bahia women – Brazilian peasant-class ladies who dressed extravagantly. She wears bright colors, enormous jewelry, and fantastic headgear, usually featuring fruit and flowers.

“O Que e que a Bahiana tem” and other numbers she performed in the New York show Streets of Paris in 1939. Soon she was seen on the screen, usually filmed in New York due to her theatrical commitments. She was dubbed the Queen of Samba.

In 1940 she did her first American movie, Down Argentine Way. She is always presented as a cliché Other, a weird amalgam of entertaining traits combined with an excessive visual style. She made 13 films in all.

As derided as she might be for her look, her musicianship was excellent and as distinctive as the later Yma Sumac, another Latin phenomenon. She did help immensely to inject Latin music into the American mainstream.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time:‘Over the Rainbow.’