ABSTRACT
The current study approaches the musical activity of Paraense artists in the first half of the 20th century, focused on the senses of "popular" developed due to the repercussion of these characters' intellectual and artistic performance. The clues examined in this work were collected in journals, memory records and folklorists' essays, related to the specified chronological term. The data indicate the existence of two areas of musical practice in this period, in which allocated themselves musician-folklorists and professional popular musicians. The text analyses the claiming of different meanings by these musicians' creations, in the Amazonian context, around categories as folklore music, popular music and artistic music.
KEYWORDS
Paraense Amazonia; popular music; folklore; show business