Stories of love: bolero influences in Brazilian popular music and their media echoes

Abstract

This article examines the incorporation of the Caribbean bolero into the Brazilian musical context, with a focus on its fusion with samba-canção. The analysis adopts a historical-cultural approach, considering records of radio programs, musical performances from the 1940s and 1950s, biographies of performers, repertoires, and musicological sources. The hybridization between bolero and Brazilian musical practices resulted in a significant set of aesthetic products, initially in the phonographic industry and later in its impact on telenovelas, which played a key role in the circulation and preservation of the genre. Bolero not only influenced the poetic structure of Brazilian popular music but also contributed to the formation of a memory and a Caribbean-inspired imaginary in Brazil. By highlighting transnational cultural flows and the symbiosis between the Caribbean genre and Brazilian music, this study reflects on how foreign musical genres are locally re-signified through media, revealing the complexity of symbolic exchanges that shape the history of Brazilian popular music.