Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse. Daniel B. Sharp
dreamed of buying a house elsewhere so that she could have some peace of mind. She was sick of it all and insisted that these problems with her neighbors were not minor. After debating at length the question of whether the woman was actually insane or merely an awful person, Iram casually mentioned that she was a distant relative. This bitterness was my first taste of the volatility of the success of the samba de coco dynasties as the traditional genre had become increasingly lucrative.
My experience on the first day also hinted at how enmeshed the careers of samba de coco musicians were with public and private sponsorship. The Calixtos invited me down the hill to their performance at the Social Service of Commerce (SESC), a nonprofit institution managed privately but funded by mandatory public revenue from the commercial sectors of manufacturing, service, and tourism.2 Its programming is open to all, but its highest priority is to promote the social well-being of the employees within these sectors and their families. The SESC in Arcoverde is a large, well-maintained complex with a cafeteria, a library, exercise machines, an indoor theater, a pool, and an outdoor area for concerts. Paintings on the walls featured various folk forms, including samba de coco. I sat outside at a table near the pool for the show. There was no cost for admission, but formally dressed waiters in bow ties circulated through the audience offering platters of hors d’oeuvres.
On stage the musicians and dancers wore matching lime green floral shirts, with the women wearing matching dresses and the men and boys in solid green pants. Ciço Gomes was singing lead, and a pair of young dancers, Fagner Gomes and Daiane Calixto, competed for the attention of the audience. Wearing wooden sandals, they performed a quick, snare drum–like dance step. Unlike, for example, Rio-based contemporary samba, in which dancers move their bodies with ginga, or a fluid, graceful swing, samba de coco dancers stomp their sandals with force to compete with many loud percussion instruments and amplified voices. Ciço commanded the stage, projecting his resonant voice through the fuzzy, overdriven sound of the PA speakers.
Behind Ciço and the dancers stood three Calixto women singing backup: Iram, her younger sister Iuma, and her mother, Dona Lourdes. The older Calixto men—Assis and his brother Damião—joined the vocal responses, filling out the harmonies while adding precise rhythmic noise with triangle and tambourine.3 The quick stutter of the surdo bass drum, played by Ciço’s son François, anchored the shimmering treble. The percussion stayed fixed and tight, other than micro variations in rhythm and timbre caused by the drum, shaker, triangle, tambourine jingles, and wooden sandal stomps suspended in tension with each other. One song’s lyrics aptly compared the layers of rhythm to a quickly moving freight train. Indeed, it sounded like a train was speeding over a rickety old wooden bridge. After the show ended Ciço introduced himself and proceeded to pepper me with witty, rapid-fire questions. He turned out to be an affable man in his late forties who performed exuberantly on- and offstage. Ciço laughed easily, his contagious grin accentuated by his mustache.
Everything described in this passage happened during my first day in Arcoverde. I did not compress events that happened over several days; the events were already compressed for me. In other words, I was being warmly received as a tourist. And tourist destinations must regularly and frequently schedule events so that even the shortest-term guest won’t arrive, wait for something to happen, and then give up and go elsewhere. My whirlwind first day of research revealed the Calixtos to be professional hosts—so professional that the visitor may not even sense that the hospitality enjoyed was, while not insincere, certainly routine.
Origin Stories
Over the weeks the intertwined origin stories of Coco Raízes and Cordel emerged through conversations with musicians and others who had informally assumed the role of producing the groups. Micheliny introduced me to Rose Mary Gomes de Souza, an insider to the rock and roots music scenes in the city. She in turn introduced me to musicians and invited me to the venues where they performed.
The Bar do Zaca was frequently the place to meet up and listen to live music. Arcoverde was large enough to have several subgroups of artists, but there were not many places to gather, so they coexisted at the Bar do Zaca. There were the “roots” musicians (música de raíz), including Alberone Padilha, a member of the original lineup of Cordel who now played in a band that combined fiddle-driven forró de rabeca and fife-based banda de pífano tunes. His friend Helton Moura, a close friend of Micheliny and Lirinha, straddled the roots and rock music scenes, playing guitar and singing both mangue beat and 1970s-style northeastern folk rock such as Alceu Valença and Zé Ramalho. Helton was also part of the radical theater crowd, which had squatted in and claimed the defunct train station in town. The group had adopted the technique of aggressive squatting honed by the MST to turn one of the oldest buildings in town into a spare cultural center run by determined activists offering free art, music, and theater classes for the poor. There were hard rockers and heavy metal enthusiasts playing in bands such as Cobaias (Guinea Pigs) and Biocídio (Biocide). In addition to these loosely formed cliques, older bohemian artists and aficionados in their thirties and forties frequented the outdoor bar. Often there was a table-to-table breakdown of these groups: rockers in the back, theater people (and the lone modern dancer) near the small stage, roots musicians drinking cane liquor on the porch behind the stage, and older bohemians at the tables between the rockers and the actors. Almost everyone present had known each other for many years, if not their whole lives. This intimacy both blurred and accentuated the distinctions between cliques. Lines were blurred in the moments when rockers would playfully heckle Helton’s sentimental song choices. Lines were accentuated when old simmering feuds repelled former friends to opposite sides of the yard.
Despite their different passions, the patrons of the Bar do Zaca were united by a common musical enemy: stylized, ultrapopular forró, known as forró estilizado, which features television-inspired aesthetics, glitzy Las Vegas–style dancers, flashy staging, fog machines, and singers with peppy but often pitchy pop vocal delivery. It was the music usually heard on the principal stage during the São João Festival, on commercial radio stations, and blaring from speaker trucks throughout the city. All of these styles—forró estilizado; the more rustic, less flashy forró pé-de-serra; samba de coco; and various styles of rock and roots music—are still performed each year during the São João Festival in Arcoverde.
Forró estilizado was an unwelcome intruder in the home of artist Suedson Neiva and his wife Amélia, who worked for the state-sponsored cultural foundation Fundarpe. Suedson and Amélia closed the shutters and told me about the formation of Coco Raízes. Amélia, a student of the Pernambucan cultural preservationist and playwright Ariano Suassuna, was assigned a post in Arcoverde as an outreach coordinator when statewide policy shifted to a platform of decentralization.4 She also worked for the municipal bureau of culture in Arcoverde. Amélia and Suedson began asking around for any previously active forms of local culture that were ripe to be rescued and supported. They had gotten to know Lula Calixto when he sang samba de coco on the street in their neighborhood. Suedson described Lula as “humble, and full of greatness,” clarifying that “his simplicity was his greatness.” He described how Lula mediated the tense conflicts between group members that were present from the beginning of the revival.
The elderly drummer Biu Neguinho was digging graves for a living when Lula and Amélia went to the cemetery to convince him to dust off his surdo bass drum and play again. Biu protested at first, but finally agreed after some convincing. None of the sexagenarians in the newly formed group had danced coco in more than fifteen years. Fundarpe provided the group with matching outfits and instruments—and, according to Suedson and Dona Amélia, organized the group at first, before stepping aside and allowing the musicians to choose a new manager and self-govern, a fact that the majority of other accounts of the history of the group omitted or downplayed.
At Home, in the Street, and on the Stage
Ciço Gomes still possessed a few of the videotapes that had survived a small fire in the Calixto home; the fire burned T-shirts, newspaper clips, and several audio- and videotapes. We watched the remaining videos, and Ciço talked about how the group had changed and adapted: “It’s very difficult to make the transition between the house, the street and the stage. We are very aware of the