On one hand, there’s nothing that holds the place of samba in the American consciousness, largely because of the differing regional histories of the US and Brazil. Samba came to prominence in part as an attempt to forge a national culture from previously disparate regional cultures in the first half of the 20th century. I’d argue that it’s at heart really a Rio de Janeiro regional genre with some Bahia thrown into the mix. Meanwhile, the 20th century in the US was marked by the country’s different regions asserting themselves after a half-century of Northeastern/Midwestern hegemony. Between winning the Civil War, rapid industrial growth, and receiving the bulk of turn-of-the-century immigration, it’s almost hard to overstate how much the northeast and Midwest were the center of American population density, culture, and self-image. Jazz, blues, and country all came from the South, which wanted to claim those styles for itself, and they became more locally representative than representative of the national culture. The Great Migration brought those styles northward, and by mid-century, there was a time where blues and jazz had really nationalized and become part of the northern urban cultural fabric, but by that time the north was losing its cultural hegemony with the growth of the Sun Belt (and black migration back south after the Civil Rights movement reinforced the Southern connection to this music).

But if there’s a single answer, it’s blues – the lyrical/melodic expressiveness and “blue note” harmonic innovations set the template for American music and can be seen in all kinds of styles, much as samba’s rhythmic and harmonic language was the foundation for all kinds of other Brazilian styles.