Noel Rosa: Google doodle on Brazilian musician who gave new twist to samba

Happy Birthday Noel Rosa!!!

Google today pays tribute to the great Brazilian singer and songwriter, Noel Rosa on his 109^th birthday. Although the guitar/mandolin player lived for only 26 years, he created his names in the list of the greatest names in Brazilian popular music artists.

Noel Rosa was born in Rio de Janeiro into a middle-class family of the Vila Isabel neighbourhood. He had a disfigured chin due to an accident with a forceps during his birth. He learned to play the mandolin while still a teenager, and soon moved on to the guitar. Although he started medicine studies, he gave most of his attention to music and would spend whole nights in bars drinking and playing with other samba musicians.

Known as the ‘Poeta da Vila’ (Poet from Vila), Noel Rosa’s observational and comedic style earned him a special place in the history of samba, the popular music of the Brazilian people. He devoted his energy to writing music and created his own style of samba by mixing witty lyrics with unpredictable twists and turns of melody and bridging the gap between rural Afro-Brazilian traditions and the sound of urban nightlife.

He had his breakthrough with ‘Com que roupa?,’ which became one of the biggest hits in 1931 in Brazil and the first of many memorable songs. With his songwriting partner Vadico, he also wrote a series of popular compositions such as ‘Feitiço da Vila’ (‘Witchcraft of the Villa’) and ‘Feitio de Oração’ (‘In the Form of a Prayer’).

Composing around 260 songs over a period of eight years, Noel Rosa established a body of work that has remained popular to this day. His legacy lives on in the hearts of cariocas (residents of Rio de Janeiro) and samba lovers around the world.

Nel Rosa married his neighbour Lindaura Martins in 1934 when he was just 23-year-old. He was a heavy smoker, and most of his photographs show him with a cigarette hanging from his lower lip. By the later 1930s his health had seriously deteriorated, and he died of tuberculosis at the age of 26 in 1937.

Google honors the great Brazilian musician, who gave a new twist to samba, on his 109^th birthday with a beautiful doodle.