This dissertation intends to investigate a sui generis case in Brazilian popular music: a fictitious personage who is present, as a protagonist, in about twenty sambas, spontaneously composed by different authors, for no apparent reason. These were major popular composers active in the 1930s, 40s and 50s – such as Noel Rosa (1910-1937), Wilson Baptista (1913-1968) and Herivelto Martins (1912-1992). This personage, Laurindo, is roughly a synthesis of many real men of his time – black men, musicians, charismatic leaders, transgressors, malandros, communists –, individuals who were often silenced or erased from official History. His fictitious trajectory crosses important moments in the social history of Rio de Janeiro and will be addressed here in the light of topics such as malandragem and Estado Novo, tradition and modernity, memory and oblivion, reality and fiction.