My dissertation research is focused on a collection of Brazilian field recordings made in 1942-44 by the music history professor Luiz Heitor Corrêa de Azevedo in partnership with the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song. Probably the richest part of Azevedo’s collection are the Afro-descended vissungos he recorded in the mining region of Diamantina, Minas Gerais, in February 1944. Vissungos are mining and funerary songs sung in a mix of African dialects — mostly of Bantu origin, and generalized as “língua” — and Portuguese. The songs contain many still unexplored keys to understanding the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants in Brazil.
With funding from the Cosmos Club, in early 2020 I was able to travel to São Paulo and Minas Gerais, Brazil, to pursue further research on Azevedo’s partnership with the LoC and the recordings he made. In late January and early February I traveled to Diamantina to see if it would be possible to find anyone familiar with the songs and their practitioners. Research there proved more fruitful than I could have imagined. I was able to make contact with the few remaining close relations of the vissungueiros — practitioners of vissungos– recorded in 1944 in several remote communities in the Diamantina region: Milho Verde, São João da Chapada, and Quartel do Indaiá. In Milho Verde, I brought copies of the recordings to Mestre Ivo Silverio da Rocha, the nearly 80-year-old nephew of the man who sang the greater part of the 1944 recordings. Mestre Ivo was thrilled to receive the recordings, which he was unaware of, and offered translations and context for several of them. And in Quartel do Indaiá, I met two women in their early 80s who were related to the last prominent vissungueiros from that community; one was especially moved upon hearing the recordings, believing she was listening to the voice of her late husband. The voice was not her husband’s, but it was a vissungueiro from the same community, who her husband probably grew up working and singing alongside. The photos I’ve included here are from those two visits.
