Listen closely. Do you hear those teenagers making a racket, rambling through the streets dressed up in costumes? They’re carrying different types of guitars (including Portuguese violas and cavaquinhos), rattling ganzás, and playing flutes, and they are the first ranchos carnavalescos, or Carnival groups. Be quiet and listen: they are black, from Bahia, descendants of slaves, and they are singing about freedom with joy. They are the grandparents of carnival in Rio de Janeiro!
Ranchos carnavalescos came about between the end of the 19th and first half of the 20th century. They were born from a tradition called Folia de Reis, an important celebration in the royal court that took place each year on January 6, or Three Kings Day.
The painter Jean-Baptiste Debret labeled those who celebrated Folia de Reis as, “an inferior class made up of mulattos and free blacks.” He described their celebrations: “Dressed in costume, they amble through city streets in small groups, accompanied by musicians. On a nice night, they continue onwards to the outskirts of the city, where they end up in some establishment and stay until dawn. Others prefer to instead organize small dance halls where they noisily entertain themselves, moving in a kind of lundu, an indecent pantomime that inspires gleeful applause from the audience throughout the night.”
The Bahian man Hilário Jovina Ferreira, resident of Barão de São Félix, is recognized as having invented ranchos carnavalescos in 1893 when he founded the group Reis de Ouro, or Kings of Gold. It was Jovina who had the idea of moving the parades from the traditional day in January to the dates of modern Carnival.
According to historian Tiago de Melo Gomes, when Jovino founded Reis de Ouro, the press harshly criticized the popular celebration for its “barbarity”. The Carnival groups needed a king and queen, along with sound of a rancho march, which did not originally include percussion. Leading the procession was standard-bearer and master of ceremonies – and the latter paraded with a knife in order to protect his group’s flag, which competing ranchos could steal. It was not uncommon for fights to break out between the different groups.