José Ramos Tinhorão Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

José Ramos Tinhorão died on August 3, 2021, in the city of São Paulo, aged 93. He had been hospitalized with pneumonia two months earlier and was weakened by a stroke he had suffered in 2018. He was buried in the Protestant’s Cemetery, in the Higienópolis neighborhood of the city.

Tinhorão attacked the Brazilian movement Tropicália and recognized its delusions of grandeur to newspaper Folha de São Paulo in 2014: “The same Gilberto Gil whom now advocates nationalism in Brazilian art wore long negligees with a Rhodia print fifty years ago”, he said.

Always based on the methodological approach proposed by Marx, he wrote for various media outlets in the 60s, in addition to JB itself: Tribuna da Imprensa, Jornal dos Sports, Agora, Jornal Rural, Singra, Revista Guaíra, Última Hora, Veja, Senhor, Diário Carioca, Jornal do Brasil, Cadernos de Estudos Brasileiros and O Globo. He collaborated with O Pasquim until 1989. In the 1990s, he definitively abandoned journalism and began to dedicate himself fully to historical research and book production. He obtained a master’s degree in social history from the University of São Paulo in 1999. From his MD thesis, the book A imprensa carnavalesca no Brasil: um panorama da linguagem cômica (The Carnival Press in Brazil: an overview of the comic language) was born, published in 2000.

In 1966, he published the first of more than twenty books he would bring out on the history of Brazilian popular music, Popular Music: a topic in debate.

He remained as a journalist at Jornal do Brasil until 1963 and then collaborated as a critic between 1974 and 1982.

In the 1960s, he would start paving his reputation as a grumpy and relentless music critic. A fierce opponent of Bossa Nova, he therefore faced several enmities against his staunch opinions. His harsh style is illustrated by a 1963 article for Senhor magazine: “Daughter of apartment adventures with the American music, who is undeniably her mother, Bossa Nova suffers from the same affliction as do many children from Copacabana, the neighborhood where she was born: she doesn’t know who the father is.”

Tinhorão stayed at the Diário Carioca until the end of 1958, when he went to Jornal do Brasil invited by fellow journalist Janio de Freitas to write for the Sunday supplement. Two years later, in the context of the creation of Caderno B, JB’s cultural supplement, Tinhorão begins his activities as a researcher of popular music, commissioned by Reynaldo Jardim, creator of Caderno B, who asked Tinhorão to write a series of articles on the history of samba.

In 1951, while still an undergraduate student, he began working as a freelancer at Revista da Semana, a now-defunct Brazilian weekly magazine in Rio de Janeiro, where he signed his texts as J. Ramos. In 1952, he was taken by Armando Nogueira, his college friend, to work as a copy editor at the Diário Carioca, one of the most popular newspapers in Rio at the time.

Born in Santos, in the state of São Paulo, Tinhorão was the eldest son of a family of Iberian immigrants (his father was Portuguese and his mother, the daughter of a Spaniard). His father worked as a waiter, sold lottery tickets and had a laundry shop. After all, he was invited by a friend to work at Urca’s casino, in Rio de Janeiro, where his family moved in 1937, when the boy was nine years old.

Tinhorão considered Jobim “not a creator, but an arranger”. He wrote that Jobim’s melody to the song Águas de Março would have been plain plagiarism of a macumba theme collected in 1933 by João Paulo Batista de Carvalho – which translates as “it’s stick, it’s stone, it’s small pebble / Bahia rolls over everything”. That was only one of several claims of plagiarism against Jobim and others made by Tinhorão.

José Ramos Tinhorão (7 February 1928 – 3 August 2021) was a Brazilian journalist, essayist, music critic, music historian and author of many books on Brazilian popular music. He was a lifelong detractor of the Bossa Nova movement, which he saw as pasteurized Jazz music assembled in the tropics.

He was also an avid collector. During his lifetime, he amassed around six thousand 78 rpm records, commercially released between 1902 and 1964, and another four thousand LPs (33 rpm), launched between 1960 and the mid 1990s. In addition to audio files, the researcher kept more than 14,000 books on popular culture and over 35,000 documents, photos, films, sheet music, pianola rolls, leaflets, magazine and newspaper collections related to music. In 2001, Tinhorão’s collection was purchased and digitized by Instituto Moreira Salles, and it is now available on the internet.

In his book Domingos Caldas Barbosa, the poet of the viola, modinha and lundu, he defends another controversial thesis – that the Portuguese genre fado was born in Brazil, not on the wharf of Lisbon, and values the influence of slaves in the Iberian culture, conversely to common Portuguese academic beliefs. According to Tinhorão, “fado arrived in Portugal at the end of the 18th century as the black dance of Brazil. It had a singing intermezzo. There are documents that show female fado singers in São Paulo as early as 1740, when people not even talked about it in Lisbon. Fado only became popular in Portugal because of Caldas Barbosa.”