Eu só quero um xodó
This song title in English roughly translates as “I Just Want a Sweetheart”. This version, by Gilberto Gil, is the version I know best, but it was originally written and recorded by Dominguinhos, who was an old-fashioned musician from the Brazilian Northeast, a rough country called the sertão, which is often translated as “backlands”. Dominguinhos played a genre of music called forro, which used to be viewed by many Brazilians as a regional hick music, much as country music was regarded here in the USA.
I lived and worked in Brazil for a couple of years and spent time in the Northeast, but never really in the sertão. I was always on the coast. I sometimes heard this style of music playing at beach parties, especially in Bahia de Todos os Santos. I came to associate it with the beach (an association that is completely spurious, really) and was told it was called “forro,” which I heard as “foral”, which has a very similar pronunciation. Foral happened to be a Portuguese word I knew, meaning “lighthouse.” (I worked on boats, so ended up learning lots of nautical Portuguese words early on.) It appealed to me to imagine a genre of music called “lighthouse”.
This music is played with an accordian and has a fun, shuffling rhythm. It was designed to be danced to.
And snooty city folks, listening to their ultra-sophisticated bossa nova, paid little attention to it, but in the late 60s, a new group of musicians originating from Bahia, a big state in Northeast Brazil (and where I first heard forro) started championing forro, including Dominguinhos. (It makes me think of how American pop musicians of the 60s rediscovered blues music.) I’m talking about musicians like Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, and Gilberto Gil, of course. I just happened to be listening to this “Eu só quero um xodó” this morning. I love the song and decided to share it.