# Vissungos and quibungos  
The presence of singing in oral cultures is extremely strong, and in several cultures rooted in African tradition, as is the case of Brazil, singing stands out as an essential element of a wide range of manifestations. In Minas Gerais, a Brazilian region populated through the exploration of gold and diamond mines in the eighteenth century, the so-called vissungos, songs sung on different occasions in the day-to-day lives of the black population in the diamond region (in the mines, on the journey to and from work, at burials) were still being recorded in the twentieth century. Songs also have a strong presence in folk tales, often acting as a fundamental element in problem solving.  
A good example is a narrative from the Girl and the pouch series, which is very recurrent in Brazil (Da Silva Campos, 1939, pp. 283-86; Alcoforado and Suárez Albán, 2001, pp. 118-21; Trigueiro and Pimentel, 1996, pp. 82-84), recorded in a book in Minas Gerais, initially by Alexina de Magalhães Pinto in 1907 (pp. 51-59 and 63-66) and later by Nair Starling (1962, pp. 117-21). In the collection Contos tradicionais do Brasil, Camara Cascudo transcribes the folk tale $A$ menina dos brincos de ouro ('The girl with the golden earrings'), which was published by Nina Rodrigues in the classic Os africanos no Brasil. Cascudo includes a note presenting three possible African hypotexts: a Yoruba folk tale published by A. B. Ellis in the book Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa; a Guinean tale published by Blaise Cendrars in his Anthologie nègre; and another published by René Basset in the book Contes populaires d'Afrique.  
The version published by Nair Starling highlights the particularly interesting presence of Candombe Seré, one of the monsters of the Bantu oral tradition. The term Candombe Seré also appears in a cantiga with a similar story collected by Lindolfo Gomes in Minas Gerais. Here, however, the monster's name is Bicho