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The Poor Fishermen of Araruama (Brazil)
I saw the shacks where the poor fishermen lived, sometimes with wife and children. They were little shanty-town shacks, but lonesome and alone, along the lake's rough shore of grasses and trees, shacks made of old, found boards and pieces of tin; ramshackle shacks pinned together with rusty nails of love, and boards stained with red blood and dark sunspots and salt-water tears from the lake and huge whipping storms that can topple whole nations in a single day. Those shacks held strong how I saw music could be. A poor man's homegrown ramshackle music. Tin-can music. Coconut-shell music. Inner-milk vibrations. See how the fingers delicately tremble out the words. See how the fish fry slowly on the little grate over the small fire in the shack's corner. I had a longing to live alone for awhile, to learn how to put these poor-man's rhythms through my hands and arms and my whole body. Forget about intellectualized sounds. Forget about that heartless mind work some call music. I wanted to make music the way the poor fishermen fish, as a necessity, and as a means to eat and live and love. - Jesse Dermody, May 21, 2011