"Quando eu piso em folhas secas, caÃdas de uma mangueira, penso na minha escola..."
Beth Carvalho, Brazil's greatest living female sambista (samba singer) was born in Rio de Janeiro on May 6, 1946. Raised in a middle class family (her father was a lawyer), she would go on to to define a genre rooted in Brazil's favelas (slums). Throughout her childhood, Beth was exposed to a variety of musical styles. Her mother, an admirer of classical music encouraged her to become a ballerina while her father regularly took her to the rehearsals of Brazil's escolas de samba (samba schools). As a teenager, she attended Rio's academy of music, where she began playing guitar. At that time, her passion was the emerging bossa nova craze, winning a national television song competition at the age of 19. The following year, she began devoting herself entirely to the samba, working with legendary composers including Nelson Sargento.
At the 1971 carnaval, she won the coveted "top vocalist" award with the escolas de samba, Unidos de SaoCarlos. Shortly thereafter, she joined the famed samba school, Mangeira, with which she has remained ever since. With her trademark deep smoky voice, she evokes a unique passion through her sambas. Another of her innovations has been the incorporation of the banjo in samba as well as using a refined cavaquinho (a small 4 stringed guitar of Portuguese origin). Throughout the 1970s, Carvalho and another legendary sambista, Clara Nunes (from the samba school Portela) seemed to alternate winning Rio's carnaval's top prize like clockwork. Following Nunes' tragic death in the early 1980s, the mantle of top female sambista has fallen solely on Carvalho's shoulders. Consequently, Brazil's leading composers have showered up her their greatest compositions, including Nelson Cavaquinho and Jorge Aragao, who composed a song that would become Carvalho's trademark, "20;Vou Festejar."
Over the past two decades, Carvalho has also focused on raising a variety of social issues through music including the plight of the poor or injustice towards Brazil's indigenous population. In a career spanning 30 years, she has recorded 24 albums, 16 of which were certified "gold" and 9 "platinum", juggled a massive touring schedule that has included performances in Miami, San Francisco, Paris, Nice, Athens, Berlin, Frankfurt, Zurich, Lisbon, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and New York's Carnegie Hall, while managing to stay at the center of attention in Rio every February during Carnaval.