Lúcio Rangel eating "soft-boiled eggs with Noel Rosa": The invention of a historiography of popular music

Abstract

During the 1950s and 60s, a generation of journalists living in the city of Rio de Janeiro became engaged in systematically commenting on and analysing various aspects of the origins of Brazil's urban popular music. Deeply interested in the subject, which also formed part of their own life experiences, they pushed beyond the limits of newspaper columns and produced exhaustive inventories, organized remarkable private collections and compiled bibliographies on the subject. Journalist Lúcio Rangel (1914-1979) was at the heart of this process. His life experience in Rio de Janeiro was important in building a memory around the phenomenon and his journalistic work had a major role in the development of specialized reviews of popular music. This article aims to critically examine aspects of this process so as to better understand Lúcio Rangel's role in building a historiographic narrative on popular music.