“Gente humilde”: a theme, two songs

Abstract

In this paper, two versions of the lyrics written between 1950 and 1970 for “Gente Humilde”, originally composed by Garoto for guitar, are analyzed. The first one, written by an unknown songwriter, is a third-person narrative that seeks to represent a socio-geographical environment inhabited by economically disadvantaged groups, reflecting an imaginary for which this environment is constituted as reserve of “purity” and “happiness”. In the second version, than signed by Vinicius de Moraes and Chico Buarque, it is possible to hear a moment of self-reflection of a sensitized individual to the precarious social conditions of existence of the “humble”, oscillating, however, between a more consequent political point of view and by the attempt to return to a communal living. The condition of poverty turns out to be naturalized both in the first version, narrated by a kind of “social voice”, and the individuality expressed in the lyrics of Vinicius and
Chico, which points to the crisis of self-image guided by the ideal of “people” and “nation” as “totality”. In this paper, we intend to demonstrate how this naturalization can be identified from a formal analysis of the works that emphasize the ambivalences and contradictions inscribed in their structures.