The "Samba Song" that's not a Song

    

Would you believe me if I told you the samba-canção is not just a type of samba song, but an intimate piece of clothing? If you’re a guy, it might be something you’re wearing right now. In English, we all know it simply as boxers. But how did boxers get the name of a musical style of the first half of the 1900s?

For about 30 years starting in the 1920s, a new samba style became popular. It wasn’t your average samba, though, since it mixed in another style similar to the American ballad or the Cuban bolero. The lyrics were sentimental, addressing romance, heartache and loneliness. Between the end of WWII and the late 1950s, it was falling out of style and, coincidentally, so were trousers. The push was towards jeans (which was coincidentally followed, on the musical scene, by a push towards Bossa Nova), meant the jeans wearer would become uncomfortable as boxers constantly rode up their legs. The solution was a new style of underwear that looked a bit like a speedo. Seeing as both the musical style and the boxers were old news, the latter took the name of the former in popular jargon.

So the next time someone mentions today’s topic, you’ll have to figure out if they’re wearing their heart on their sleeve or a samba-canção underneath.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jpgKBbNmN0]

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