Luiz Gonzaga
Luiz Gonzaga ( born December 13, 1912 in Exu, Pernambuco, Brazil; † August 2, 1989 in Recife ) was a singer, accordion player and composer. His great achievement was to make known the typical music of the Brazilian Northeast in the country.
Life
Luiz Gonzaga grew up the son of a farmer who used to play the Sanfona. From a young age he taught himself the accordion, the Sanfona and zabumba to play ( kind of a big bass drum), and he sang at festivals and religious ceremonies. When he dared to fall in love with the daughter of high society and then - as he later told - was beaten half dead by his own mother because of such impropriety, he left with his Sanfona his parents' house, never to return. He slapped his performances at dance festivals by, where he played the forró especially.
In 1930, he joined the army and was playing in a military band until 1939. Afterwards, he decided to live in Rio de Janeiro and to earn in bars with boleros, waltzes and tangos his livelihood. In 1941, he won the title Vira e Mexicanos first prize in the talent competition by Ary Barroso. When he discovered that the immigrants from the northeast in the cosmopolitan city of Rio missed their native music, he took their typical styles such as baião, Xaxado, Chamego and Côco to his repertoire. Having recognized this gap in the market, he was invited to appear regularly on radio broadcasts. In 1943 he started to wear a typical northeastern Brazilian costumes for his performances and thus became a cult figure. In 1945 he took on his first records: the Mazurka Dança Mariquinha. Until 1954 he worked in radio and sat trends, as far as the music style of the baião.
Luiz Gonzaga is regarded as well-known representative of the forró. After the advent of bossa nova his music was not played so often in the larger cities, but its notoriety in rural areas remained unbroken.
In the 1970s and 1980s, he played pieces of the famous composer Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento and his adopted son Gonzaguinha. Many of his well-known successful title created in collaboration with Humberto Teixeira.
Selections
- ABC do Sertão
- Algodão
- Asa Branca
- Assum Preto
- A Volta da Asa Branca
- Baião de Dois
- Cintura Fina
- Derramaro o Gai
- Imbalança
- Juazeiro
- Légua Tirana
- No Meu Pé de Serra
- O Xote Meninas
- Paraíba
- Pau -De- Arara
- Qui Nem Jiló
- Vozes since Seca