Asa Branca

The asa-branca, or white wing, is the picazuro pigeon, and in the dry backlands of Brazil's Northeast its departure was a sign that the drought had won. Luiz Gonzaga and Humberto Teixeira, both northeasterners, built a song around that image in 1947: the earth burning like a midsummer bonfire, the bird gone, and a young man forced to leave the sertão and his sweetheart Rosinha, promising to come back one day. Gonzaga was the son of a farmer and accordion player and had worked the streets and bars of Rio before radio made him a star. By the Portuguese account, the two wrote the song at RCA's studios in Rio on 3 March 1947, and the label was not keen on it at first; only Gonzaga's persistence got it recorded. It became his greatest hit. With accordion, zabumba drum and triangle, he carried baião from northeastern folklore into national pop, and Caetano Veloso later called him the first significant cultural event with mass appeal in Brazil. Gonzaga even wrote a sequel, "A Volta da Asa-Branca", in which the rain, the bird and the migrant all return. The song never left. Brazil's collecting society ECAD counts it among the most played songs at the June festivals and, in a 2021 report, as the fourth most recorded song in the country's history, with 316 versions. For the millions who left the Northeast for the southern cities, it is still the anthem of the people of the sertão.