Aldir Blanc, a lyricist who pushed boundaries of samba, dies at 73

Aldir Blanc wanted to be a doctor and was studying psychiatry in Rio de Janeiro. But he also dabbled in music, and in 1970 he had a chance encounter with a guitarist named João Bosco that changed the course of his life.

That meeting led to a collaboration that would reimagine the boundaries of samba and help turn Blanc into one of the most revered lyricists of his generation.

The men began working together, with Bosco writing the music and Blanc the words, and helped develop a new form of samba that delved into social issues and politics during the restrictive years of Brazil’s military dictatorship. Blanc became adept at skirting government censors through allegory and wordplay.

One of the duo’s most famous songs, “O Bêbado e a Equilibrista” (“The Drunk and the Tightrope Walker”), written in 1978, was ostensibly about a Charlie Chaplin film.

The song subtly criticized Brazil’s government and called for the peaceful return of political refugees. Sung soulfully by Elis Regina, it became a kind of amnesty anthem and a popular call for the reinstitution of democracy.

“Crazy and drunk in his bowler hat,” went one lyric, “he was behaving like an irreverent brat at nighttime in Brazil, my Brazil.”

Blanc died May 4 at a hospital in Rio. He was 73. His stepdaughter Patrícia de Sá Freire Ferreira said the cause was COVID-19.

“I want to sing our songs as long as I have the strength,” Bosco, who became one of Brazil’s greatest guitarists, wrote on Facebook after his death. “A person only dies when their legacy dies. And I’m here to make sure the spirit of Aldir lives on. I and all the Brazilians touched by his genius.”

A bearish man with long white hair and a bushy beard, Blanc was considered a kind of Brazilian Bob Dylan, his songs reflecting the hardscrabble lives and language of the working-class neighborhoods where he lived, according to Hugo Sukman, author of “Parallel Stories — 50 Years of Brazilian Music” (2011).

An only child, Aldir Blanc Mendes was born Sept. 2, 1946, in Rio. His father, Alceu Blanc Mendes, was a public servant. His mother, Helena Aguiar Mendes, was a homemaker.