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 difference between these contexts. One has to really make an effort to animate a crowd from the stage. In the beginning, we didn’t even have a PA system, just one microphone with a small amplifier. After this, we played on a small stage during São João. We played there, and everyone said ‘man, this is great!’ and put us on the larger stages.”
One of the most striking shifts in the group’s performance on stage was the decision to drastically reduce the number of dancers, from around twenty-five to two or three at a time. Fagner, the best young male dancer from the Gomes family, and Daiane, the best young female dancer from the Calixto family, ended up specializing in that role. From that point forward the group’s performances were no longer a direct transfer of practices developed in informal, participative contexts. Instead, the circle of dancers broke apart and the musicians faced the audience. Fagner and Daiane served as the group’s representatives. They would demonstrate the steps on stage, then jump down into the crowd to coax audience members to dance: “Fagner and Daiane [were the ones who] began this business of getting down from the stage to dance with everyone, snaking through the crowd and getting the circle dance started. It was they who did this.” Each larger stage where they performed gave them motivation to rehearse their vocal harmonies and tighten the layers of percussion: “After playing on the largest stages during São João in Arcoverde, they called us to play in Recife, so we went there. We had to realize that we weren’t that little group that plays in someone’s house anymore. We had to clean up the small mistakes and concentrate harder on really playing well for the stage.”
Government cultural preservation efforts and commerce have worked hand in hand in the story of samba de coco in Arcoverde. By 2004 recordings of the music of Coco Raízes would serve as the soundtrack to the chamber of commerce convention and a fashion show in the publicly funded colonial district of downtown Recife. Government festivals provided the band with a career ladder to climb as it honed its craft, from local Arcoverde festival stages to Recife’s Carnaval.
SAMBA DE COCO PERFORMED AT HOME
One of the earliest videotapes from Ciço Gomes’s collection contained footage of his daughter’s birthday party in 1996, providing an example of an informal performance of samba de coco for family and friends, before the group began performing on stage. On the tape the white noise of the shakers, the metallic clang of the triangle, and the staccato booms of the surdo drum enveloped the dancers as they moved in a circle around a small living room cleared of furniture. The percussionists lined the wall behind the circle, and everyone sang the refrains in response to whoever was singing lead at the time. Everyone present was dressed in everyday attire: T-shirts, shorts, trousers, dresses. The mood in the room was of orderly, family-friendly, alcohol-free celebration. The lead singer was alternately Lula Calixto, who was singing in a pinched tone, straining to project over the percussion and the din of voices at the party as he danced in the circle, or Ciço, who stood either in the middle of the circle or outside it. Ciço was constantly making eye contact, singing lines directly to partygoers, lifting people’s spirits, and encouraging participation. The force of everyone singing together was more important than the precision of the harmonies, which were roughly parallel thirds. The musicians traded improvised verses, many of which referred to the fact that they were being filmed.
Most of the dancers’ steps included a slight shuffle/slide that emulated the swish of the shaker, a touch that was easier to sustain in everyday leather- and rubber-soled shoes than it would be later in wooden sandals, which require an emphatic, precise stomp. There was much more variation in how the dancers accented the basic steps than at later performances on stage. When a song began its rapid-fire embolada section, the dancers stopped singing and focused on the quicker-stepped trupé dance. While later crowds, such as those in Recife, would take their cues from the dancers on stage, with everyone striving to execute the RlrLrlrl pattern, in this roda some dancers preferred rLrlrLrl, or even Rl.lR1.1, flowing with or against the grain of the shaker and triangle parts.5
The room was small for the thirty or so people who were dancing in it, and the proximity of bodies circulating counterclockwise resembled circles found in candomblé terreiros (houses of Afro-Brazilian religion), the initiates packed one after the next, all moving in the same direction around the axis point in the center of the room. In this videotape members of all three families, Lopes, Calixto, and Gomes, were seen celebrating with friends and neighbors—a scene one would not have seen a few years earlier, when the families danced separately, and did not see a few years later, when a family feud had broken out between the Lopeses and Calixtos.
The 1996 video was one of the earliest remaining recordings of the samba de coco revival in Arcoverde. The footage had been taken soon after Fundarpe had worked with Lula Calixto to gather the three families of musicians and convince them to resume playing, singing, and dancing samba de coco. Prior to this moment certain members of the families had played together before—Lopes and Gomes, for example—but others had not. The revival of samba de coco in Arcoverde in the mid-1990s involved the negotiation of musical style. Lula Calixto’s notion of the genre included a love for midtempo cocos, while Ciço Gomes and Biu Neguinho, who had a long history of playing with the Lopes family, would storm through songs at blazing speeds. Biu’s previous experience leading a Rio-style samba school influenced his distinctive sticking patterns.
Through their sponsorship, Fundarpe and the SESC cast samba de coco as heritage, fitting
