Brazil: Forró - Music for Maids and Taxi Drivers
1989 compilation album by Various Artists
Brazil: Forró – Music for Maids and Taxi Drivers is a various artists genre compilation album that was dedicated to Forró, a music style from Brazil. Released in 1989, the album was nominated for the Best Traditional Folk Album in the 33rd Annual Grammy Awards two years later.
According to US producer Gerald Seligman, the original tracks were produced by Zé da Flauta, who came to prominence in the group Quinteto Violado, founded in Recife in 1970 and most active throughout that decade. Zé sold the forró master tapes and all rights to Rio de Janeiro-based Carlão de Andrade of Visom Records, who pressed them intending for the sales to help fund the start-up of his label of instrumental music. There they languished until Seligman spied them in a Visom closet in 1987. He took them back to NY, recognized their value as a rare example of roots forró music and approached both GlobeStyle Records in the UK and Rounder in the US to gauge interest in a compilation. Both signed on. Seligman also commissioned acclaimed woodblock artist Marcelo Soares to create the cover in the style of Literatura de Cordel, which are popular rhyming broadsides distributed throughout the Brazilian Northeast.
“Brazil: Forró - Music for Maids and Taxi Drivers” enters the record as 1989 compilation album by Various Artists. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Brazil, Forró and Music can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Brazil: Forró - Music for Maids and Taxi Drivers” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Brazil, Forró and Music provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 4, 2023. The linked authority identifier is Q65174320. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1989, 1970 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Brazil: Forró - Music for Maids and Taxi Drivers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.