Biography
Cornélio Pires stood out as Brazil’s inaugural independent record producer and the pioneer who first committed genuine, traditional caipira music to disc. During the opening decades of the twentieth century he served as the foremost champion of the rural culture native to upstate São Paulo. In addition to authoring twenty-six volumes that gathered caipira anecdotes, verse, humor, and studies of regional music and speech, he wrote and performed his own comic monologues and delivered public lectures on the same subjects. Traveling constantly and drawing sizable crowds across Brazil, above all in the interior of São Paulo, he captivated city audiences with the distinctive blend of innocence and shrewdness that he had absorbed from caipira speech, outlook, melodies, and daily preoccupations. He also published prose fiction; one tale, Passe os Vinte, was adapted for the screen by Antônio de Campos under the title O Curandeiro. In 1923 he joined filmmaker Flamínio de Campos Gatti on an extensive journey through the country to shoot the documentary Brasil Pitoresco.
By 1910 Pires had gained sufficient familiarity with the rodas de violeiros to stage his first public program at Mackenzie College, presenting rural musicians, singers, and dancers—cururueiros, catireiros, cantadores, and dançadores—in a traditional lykewake followed by a lecture explaining the region’s social realities. That same year he released his debut book, Musa Caipira. Restless and bohemian, he drifted between towns and occupations, at one point attempting to teach physical education despite weighing more than two hundred pounds, only to lose each position in turn. Beginning in 1912 he mounted a series of solo performances in which, impeccably dressed in suits or morning coats, he portrayed caipiras through jokes and stories. At a moment when roughly eighty percent of Brazilians still resided in the countryside, caipira themes exerted strong influence on urban artistic production in music, literature, and theater, a development that the emerging culture industry could not ignore.
The earliest commercial discs of caipira material included Baiano’s 1902 recitation of the poem “A Cabocla,” the 1912 duet “Cateretê Paulista” by Baiano and Eduardo das Neves, and Cadete’s lundu “Caipira Paulista,” also from 1912. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s additional figures from varied backgrounds—among them the classical composer Heitor Villa-Lobos with “Cânticos Sertanejos” and “A Lenda do Caboclo,” as well as João Pernambuco, Catulo da Paixão Cearense, Jararaca e Ratinho, Augusto Calheiros, and the Turunas da Mauricéia—successfully explored the caipira repertoire. Heartened by these precedents, Pires approached Columbia’s recording engineer Wallace Downey in 1929, accompanied by his nephew Ariovaldo Pires, later known as Capitão Furtado. Downey introduced them to the Brazilian representative Albert Jackson Byington Jr., who initially declined to record unknown caipira performers, believing urban listeners preferred established stars such as Francisco Alves and Paraguassu. Pires therefore offered to finance the sessions and pressings himself. He borrowed a substantial sum to produce five albums of five thousand copies each—an unusually large commitment even for the leading artists of the day—then returned to Piracicaba to assemble his already rehearsed ensemble, Turma Caipira Cornélio Pires, whose core members were Zico Dias e Ferrinho, Arlindo Santana e Sebastiãozinho, and the brothers Caçula e Mariano. Upon reaching São Paulo he insisted on receiving his own label and catalog numbers.
Consequently the celebrated red series, Série Caipira Cornélio Pires, appeared in 1929, numbered 20,000 through 20,005: six albums of five thousand copies apiece, for a total of thirty thousand 78-rpm discs containing jokes, desafios, and authentic caipira genres, among them the first recorded moda de viola, “Jorginho do Sertão,” collected by Pires and performed by Caçula e Mariano. The entire stock was loaded into two automobiles and sold directly in markets, at fairs, and through Pires’s own store, Casa Cornélio, a radio and Victrola shop in central São Paulo. Once the pressing sold out, Pires negotiated fresh terms with Columbia. Now backed and distributed by Byington, he became Brazil’s first independent producer. Through 1931 he oversaw another forty-three albums, the earliest twelve of which carried erroneous composer credits to himself. He soon faced competition from Lourenço, formerly of the duo Lourenço e Olegário that Pires had discovered and included in his Turma Caipira; Lourenço later secured an independent arrangement with RCA Victor, and other labels followed suit. Pires thereafter devoted himself to writing and, until 1958, to organizing caravan tours sponsored by the Antarctica beverage company—promoting only its non-alcoholic products, consistent with his own recovery from alcoholism—serving as host, entertainer, and narrator alongside dancers and singers. Following his death, his birthplace Tietê established the Cornélio Pires Museum and, beginning in 1959, has staged the annual Cornélio Pires Week.
By 1910 Pires had gained sufficient familiarity with the rodas de violeiros to stage his first public program at Mackenzie College, presenting rural musicians, singers, and dancers—cururueiros, catireiros, cantadores, and dançadores—in a traditional lykewake followed by a lecture explaining the region’s social realities. That same year he released his debut book, Musa Caipira. Restless and bohemian, he drifted between towns and occupations, at one point attempting to teach physical education despite weighing more than two hundred pounds, only to lose each position in turn. Beginning in 1912 he mounted a series of solo performances in which, impeccably dressed in suits or morning coats, he portrayed caipiras through jokes and stories. At a moment when roughly eighty percent of Brazilians still resided in the countryside, caipira themes exerted strong influence on urban artistic production in music, literature, and theater, a development that the emerging culture industry could not ignore.
The earliest commercial discs of caipira material included Baiano’s 1902 recitation of the poem “A Cabocla,” the 1912 duet “Cateretê Paulista” by Baiano and Eduardo das Neves, and Cadete’s lundu “Caipira Paulista,” also from 1912. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s additional figures from varied backgrounds—among them the classical composer Heitor Villa-Lobos with “Cânticos Sertanejos” and “A Lenda do Caboclo,” as well as João Pernambuco, Catulo da Paixão Cearense, Jararaca e Ratinho, Augusto Calheiros, and the Turunas da Mauricéia—successfully explored the caipira repertoire. Heartened by these precedents, Pires approached Columbia’s recording engineer Wallace Downey in 1929, accompanied by his nephew Ariovaldo Pires, later known as Capitão Furtado. Downey introduced them to the Brazilian representative Albert Jackson Byington Jr., who initially declined to record unknown caipira performers, believing urban listeners preferred established stars such as Francisco Alves and Paraguassu. Pires therefore offered to finance the sessions and pressings himself. He borrowed a substantial sum to produce five albums of five thousand copies each—an unusually large commitment even for the leading artists of the day—then returned to Piracicaba to assemble his already rehearsed ensemble, Turma Caipira Cornélio Pires, whose core members were Zico Dias e Ferrinho, Arlindo Santana e Sebastiãozinho, and the brothers Caçula e Mariano. Upon reaching São Paulo he insisted on receiving his own label and catalog numbers.
Consequently the celebrated red series, Série Caipira Cornélio Pires, appeared in 1929, numbered 20,000 through 20,005: six albums of five thousand copies apiece, for a total of thirty thousand 78-rpm discs containing jokes, desafios, and authentic caipira genres, among them the first recorded moda de viola, “Jorginho do Sertão,” collected by Pires and performed by Caçula e Mariano. The entire stock was loaded into two automobiles and sold directly in markets, at fairs, and through Pires’s own store, Casa Cornélio, a radio and Victrola shop in central São Paulo. Once the pressing sold out, Pires negotiated fresh terms with Columbia. Now backed and distributed by Byington, he became Brazil’s first independent producer. Through 1931 he oversaw another forty-three albums, the earliest twelve of which carried erroneous composer credits to himself. He soon faced competition from Lourenço, formerly of the duo Lourenço e Olegário that Pires had discovered and included in his Turma Caipira; Lourenço later secured an independent arrangement with RCA Victor, and other labels followed suit. Pires thereafter devoted himself to writing and, until 1958, to organizing caravan tours sponsored by the Antarctica beverage company—promoting only its non-alcoholic products, consistent with his own recovery from alcoholism—serving as host, entertainer, and narrator alongside dancers and singers. Following his death, his birthplace Tietê established the Cornélio Pires Museum and, beginning in 1959, has staged the annual Cornélio Pires Week.
Albums
