Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!The band was still tuning up when the first screams pealed through the crowded fairgrounds in Cuiabá, a regional capital in Brazil’s farm belt. A few feet from the stage, a 10-year-old girl in a spangled black cowboy hat, sequined jeans, and embroidered leather boots added hers to the mix, her cheeks wet with happy tears. Her eyes were locked on Ana Castela, the reigning star of Brazilian country music, as she owned the main stage at the Expoagro. “She is incredible, wonderful,” the young girl gushed afterward. “She’s perfect.”
Castela, a 22-year-old velvet-voiced pop diva with a Latin Grammy in her saddlebag and 15.4 million monthly listeners on Spotify, is the latest idol from Brazil’s homegrown style of music called sertanejo. The folk music began in the sertão,the country’s hardscrabble backlands, but has since modernized, electrified, and taken over the charts with everything from torch songs to subgenres like agronejo, with its odes to Big Agriculture. (As one hit song’s lyrics go: Hey, hey, hey, spraying poison from the plane.) Today the most popular sound in Brazilian music exalts a saddles-and-pickups spirit buoyed by the conversion of forests, prairies, and savannas into commodity crops, livestock ranches, and a trade surplus.
Twin-sister sertanejo duo Maiara & Maraisa (first image) was just one of the genre’s iconic acts headlining the fair across its 10 days. Fans, including Emilly Narciso Rodrigues (last image), came decked out.
“Half of the music consumed in Brazil today is sertanejo. The other half is everything else,” said former president of Sony Music Brasil Paulo Junqueiro, who helped oversee the explosion of country music. “So we are talking about a genre that represents half the output of all new artists.” No rodeo or farm expo (and there are hundreds across Brazil every year) is complete without a lineup of sertanejo artists crooning to stadium-size crowds.
