de coco in an organized fashion only after Lula Calixto and Fundarpe’s Dona Amélia brought the group together in the mid-1990s, they became emblematic of the unbroken transmission of tradition in Arcoverde from generation to generation.
In addition to conflicts over professionalism and patrimony, race was a largely unspoken factor underlying the public’s anointing of the Calixtos as the public representatives of Arcoverde’s living folk traditions. Although all three families are mixed race, like the majority of families in Northeast Brazil, the Calixtos are darker skinned and perceived as phenotypically Afro-Brazilian, while the Lopes family is lighter skinned and considered mestiço. In the 1990s, unlike in the 1950s through early 1970s, which were the heyday of Ivo Lopes’s group, samba de coco in Arcoverde struck a chord with Recifenses and other outsiders in part because of its distinctive Afro-Brazilian feel in the midst of the mestiço cowboy culture dominant in the sertão. At performances I often heard comments that the Calixto family must have originally come to the sertão as part of a quilombo community of escaped slaves, highlighting the fact that the Calixtos’ skin tone was dark enough by sertão standards to be deemed worthy of remark.2 A local Afrocentric newspaper, Abibiman, frequently highlighted the story of samba de coco in its pages, featuring articles on a local example of Afro-Brazilian culture that deserved to be celebrated.
After the prospect of making a career out of coco began to appear viable, the Calixto family pushed to professionalize the group. The popularity of Cordel was on the rise throughout Pernambuco, raising the samba de coco musicians’ expectations of their prospects. The samba de coco group, then called A Caravana de Ivo Lopes, had recently participated in a Recife-based compilation CD. Lula’s dream of recording a CD was about to be realized, since Arcoverde’s mayor, Rosa Barros, had agreed to provide financial support and transportation to Recife for the recording. At the last group meeting that Lula attended, Severina Lopes had signed documents authorizing the group to record several of her brother’s songs.
The feud deepened when the first pressing of CDs arrived and Severina Lopes was contacted to sign a release form. In the bureaucratic paperwork establishing the group as an official association, which was necessary to receive government support, Severina Lopes was still listed as the group’s leader. Now estranged from the current group and in the process of establishing her own rival group, she vehemently refused to sign off on a recording that included four songs she claimed were written by her brother Ivo. In his account of the feud, Ciço Gomes, the lead singer of the Calixto/Gomes group that had changed their name to Coco Raízes, countered that some of the songs actually predated Ivo Lopes’s group, and that others had been written collaboratively when he sang in Ivo’s group years before. Ciço also questioned what constituted authorship in a genre in which improvisation played such a prominent role. Severina held her ground, and the CDs were withheld from the market until three thousand more were printed without the songs in question, reducing the track count from sixteen to twelve.
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