Forró does not come "for all"...

 

Hi there,

I have seen the misconception of the origin of the name forró being passed around for too long.

And I am tired of it.

Forró is just short for Forrobodó which means "great party" or "commotion" (in Portuguese); itself a corruption of “fauxbourdon” which was used in the Portuguese court to define a dull party.

This has also been proved by the great Brazilian folklorist and historian Câmara Cascudo, who studied the Brazilian Northeast (culture? region? or Brazil's Northeast?) through most of his life.

The suggestion of forró being a derivative of the English expression “for all” comes from the belief that in 1900, the English engineers on the Great Western Railway of Brazil, near Recife, would throw balls on weekends and classify them as either only for railroad personnel or for the general populace ("for all").

This was reinforced by a similar practice by the USAF personnel stationed at the Natal Air Force Base during World War II. The reason why the theory cannot be accepted as true and unrelated is that before the USAF were stationed in Natal, the name "Forró" was already in use.