outfits established the timeline of the group. The first photos, from the mid-1990s, featured an off-white pattern with large, ornate orange and brown blossoms on camp shirts and long, old-fashioned dresses. Later they settled on a lime green and yellow floral print.
Talking to the Calixtos, I began to glimpse the complex network of individuals and institutions, from local to international, that supported this family so revered as bearers of tradition. I asked about a newspaper clipping on the wall about a jazz drummer from Chicago named Andrew Potter, and Assis turned on a boom box to play Potter’s instrumental version of Assis’s song “Balanço da canoa” (The sway of the canoe). It began with a drum solo that riffed on variations of the two rhythmic cells upon which Coco Raízes’s songs are based: the 3+3+2 timeline of samba de coco and a fast-paced duple meter of foguetes de roda. Soon the other musicians joined in: an electrified upright bass carried the melody, while the chords were filled in on an electric piano. As we listened, Assis sang his lead part, and his nieces, Iuma and Iram, sang their response, which mimicked the sound of waves lapping against a canoe. They clapped along and coaxed his three-year-old nephew Luizinho to demonstrate his prowess at dancing coco. Assis pulled a coin from his pocket to sweeten the deal, and the boy hammed it up, stomping remarkably well for one his age.
Meanwhile Iram sat down, irritated by an unproductive meeting about T-shirt designs, muttering something about contracts and verbal commitments that had fallen through. She had the abrupt manner of a businessperson in high demand. Iram was used to interviews, but I was not asking the questions that she usually fielded. This made her impatient. I struggled to come up with a question for her regarding the group’s state sponsorship. I had thought that it would take at least a few weeks to become acquainted before launching into my research questions. My position as a long-term visitor would end up being a bit baffling for the musicians to locate. They were unsure whether to treat me as a tourist, a journalist, or just another local attendee of their parties.
Iram’s attitude toward her neighborhood during this encounter stood in stark contrast to the reverent manner in which the neighborhood was treated by fans and in the lyrics of Coco Raízes’s songs. As I tried to ask another question, a woman on the street walked by with anger in her eyes. She glared at Iram and spat out an insult I did not understand. Initially unruffled by the incident, Iram dismissed it with a wave of her hand, adding, “She’s just jealous of us, and our success.” Her annoyance grew, however, leading her to repeat that she could no longer stand living on their street and 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
