History professor Bryan McCann received a national award for his study of the cultural impact of popular music in Brazil during the 20th century.

McCann, who also serves as director of Georgetown’s Brazilian Studies Program, received the 2005 Woody Guthrie Award from the U.S. branch of the International Association for Study of Popular Music in recognition of his study of Brazilian music.

McCann explored the use of Brazilian popular music as a cultural tool in early 20th-century Brazil in his 2004 book, “Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil.” The book analyzes concepts like the samba as a national symbol and examines northeastern Brazil, “a repository of agrarian virtues and authentic cultural roots,” McCann said.

“I demonstrate how these tendencies took shape in the broadcasting and recording industries [of the early 20th century],” he said, “and what they have meant to successive generations of Brazilians.”

McCann said that his interest in Brazilian culture began while he was working as a disc jockey at his college radio station and listening to bossa nova, a famous music style that derived from samba in the late 1950s.

McCan’s decision to write the book came while working on a dissertation on government-broadcast propaganda, which he said he found created less of a cultural impact than was commonly believed among scholars.

“The real formative cultural influences were outside the official government projects, in the popular market, and I decided to investigate those more closely,” McCann said.

The Woody Guthrie Award is given annually by the IASPM-U.S. to recognize the year’s most distinguished monograph in popular music studies written in the English language, according to the organization’s Web site.

The award is named for the famous American folk singer Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, who McCann said he personally admires.

“[I am] honored and humbled to receive an award named for one of my heroes,” he said.