'Luz do Repente', ' Sorriso Aberto', ' Sonho Juvenil Garoto Zona Sul', ' Sorriso de Banjo' and ' Bagaço da Laranja' is only a bit from Jovelina's music pearls.Īt only 12 years old, young Dona Ivone Lara (1922-2018) composed her very first samba song, ' Tiê.' She's played in samba circles until the present day. In her eleven-year-career, Jovelina has recorded nine solo albums. A member of Império Serrano (one of Rio de Janeiro's traditional samba schools) and a former housemaid who started a music career at 40 years old, Jovelina has composed with high-profile names from Rio's samba scene, such as Zeca Pagodinho, Arlindo Cruz, Beto Sem Braço and Dona Ivone Lara. When it comes to partido-alto (a samba sub-genre marked by improvisation and a singalong chorus line), Pérola Negra (Black Pearl, in English) killed it, combining smart, humored lyrics with the perfect partido-alto flow. Owner of a Clementina-like, ravishingly low voice that expresses the genuine truth of samba carioca, Pérola Negra (1944-1988) is one of the most important samba composers in Brazil. In present-day rodas de samba, Jovelina Pérola Negra is omnipresent. There is no contemporary roda de samba (the traditional performative setting through which musicians make a circle to play samba) that does not revere Queen Quelé, as she's affectionately called, and the African heritage that pulsates in her songs, influenced by jongo and other Afro-Brazilian music cultures from Rio de Janeiro's countryside. At 63 years old, she was 'discovered' by influential MPB producers and rapidly became an entity of the samba environment, both in Rio and Brazil.

Born in Rio de Janeiro's countryside, Clementina moved to the capital as a child (1908) and worked as a housemaid for the most part of her life. There couldn't be a better metaphor to describe the legacy of Clementina, who rescued a supposedly lost African musical ancestry and incorporated it into Rio's urban samba. Scholars, critics, and fans say that Clementina de Jesus (1901-1987) is the proof that Africa runs through the veins of Música Popular Brasileira (a generic term entangling all sonorities understood as 'Brazilian popular music').

Samba music artists