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John Fahey

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''If you are looking for the former Premier of New South Wales, see John Fahey (politician).
John Fahey ( February 28, 1939–February 22, 2001) was an American guitarist and composer, and one of the first guitarists to perform solo instrumental steel-string acoustic guitar. His music, described by some as American Primitivism, drew inspiration from American folk music, blues, classical music, Brazilian music, and Indian music. In several of his later works, he experimented with electric dissonance and noise; these later works have been compared with musique concrète and industrial music.

Contents

Career

John Aloysius Fahey was born in Takoma Park, MD into a musical household--both his parents played the piano. On weekends, the family often attended performances of top country and bluegrass groups of the day, but it was hearing Bill Monroe's version of Jimmie Rodgers' "Blue Yodel No. 7" on the radio that ignited the young Fahey's passion for music.

In 1952 he purchased his first guitar for $17 from the Sears-Roebuck catalogue. Along with his budding interest in guitar, Fahey was attracted to record collecting. While his tastes ran mainly in the bluegrass and country vein, Fahey discovered his love of early blues upon hearing Blind Willie Johnson's "Praise God I'm Satisfied" on a record-collecting trip to Baltimore with his friend and mentor, the musicologist Richard K. Spottswood. Much later, Fahey compared the experience to a religious conversion and remained a devout blues disciple until his death.

As his guitar playing and composing progressed, Fahey developed a style that blended the picking patterns he discovered on old blues 78s with the dissonance of contemporary classical composers he loved, such as Charles Ives and Béla Bartók. In 1958 Fahey made his first recordings. These were for his friend Joe Bussard's amateur Fonotone label. He recorded under various pseudonyms, mainly as Blind Thomas.

The following year, having no idea how to approach professional record companies, Fahey decided to issue his first album himself, using some cash saved from his gas station attendant job and some borrowed from an Episcopalian priest. So Takoma Records was born, named in honor of his hometown. On one side of the album sleeve was the name "John Fahey" and on the other, "Blind Joe Death," another Fahey pseudonym. He had 100 copies pressed. Some he gave away, some he sneaked into thrift stores and blues sections of local record shops, and some he sent to folk music scholars, a few of whom were fooled into thinking that there really was a living old blues singer called Blind Joe Death. It took three years for Fahey to sell the remainder.

After graduating from American University with a degree in philosophy and religion, Fahey moved to California in 1963 to study philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. Arriving on campus, Fahey — ever the outsider — began to feel dissatisfied with the program's curriculum (he later confessed that studying philosophy had been a mistake and that he had intended to study psychology) and was equally unimpressed with Berkeley's (hippie) music scene. The following year, Fahey moved south to Los Angeles to join the folklore master's program at UCLA at the invitation of department head D.K. Wilgus. While living in Los Angeles, Fahey made a pilgrimage to the Deep South and was instrumental in the rediscovery of bluesmen Skip James and Bukka White. Fahey's UCLA master's thesis on the music of Charley Patton, later published, is considered among the very best of folklore academia. He completed it with the musicological assistance of his friend Alan Wilson, who shortly after became a member of Canned Heat.

While a graduate student, Fahey continued to record. His releases during the mid '60s employed odd guitar tunings and sudden style shifts rooted firmly in the old time and blues stylings of the 1920s. But he was not simply a copyist, as compositions such as "When the Cactus is in Bloom" or "Stomping Tonight on the Pennsylvania/Alabama Border" demonstrate. Fahey described the latter piece as follows : "The opening chords are from the last movement of Vaughan Williams' Sixth Symphony. It goes from there to a Skip James motif. Following that it moves to a Gregorian chant, 'Dies Irae'. It's the most scary one in the Episcopal hymn books, it's all about the day of judgement. Then it returns to the Vaughan Williams chords, followed by a blues run of undetermined origin, then back to Skip James and so forth." A hallmark of his classic releases was the inclusion of lengthy liner notes, parodying those found on blues releases. Typically, these were epic acts of self-mythologization, mixing personal biography, reverie, folklore and myriad obscure blues and bluegrass references.

Later albums from the sixties, such as Requia and The Yellow Princess found Fahey making sound collages from such elements as Gamelan music, Tibetan chanting, animal and bird cries and singing bridges. In 1967, Fahey recorded with Red Crayola at the 1967 Berkeley Folk Festival, music that resurfaced on the 1998 Drag City reissue, The Red Krayola: Live 1967. Fahey is rumoured to have recorded a further album with that group around this time, but this is apparently lost.

In addition to his own creative output, Fahey expanded the Takoma label, discovering fellow guitarists Leo Kottke, Robbie Băsho and Peter Lang, as well as emerging pianist George Winston. Kottke's debut release on the label, 6- and 12-String Guitar, ultimately proved to be the most successful of the crop, selling more than 500,000 copies. Fahey eventually sold Takoma to Chrysalis Records in the mid-'70s.

The record critic John Swenson gave 5 star (highest) ratings to several of Fahey's records (Blind Joe Death, and Best of John Fahey) in the best selling book The Rolling Stone Record Guide (1979).

Later years

By the 1970s Fahey's output had slowed and he was beginning to suffer from a drinking problem. He lost his home in the dissolution of his first marriage, remarried in the late '70s and moved to Salem, Oregon in 1981. In 1986, Fahey contracted Epstein-Barr syndrome, a long-lasting viral infection similar to chronic fatigue, which exacerbated his diabetes and other health issues. He broke up with his third wife and his life began to spiral downwards. He made what appeared to be his last album in 1990, and silence descended.

Although he won his five-year battle with Epstein-Barr, Fahey spent much of the early 1990s living in poverty, mostly in cheap motels, where he paid his rent by pawning his guitars and reselling rare records he found in thrift stores.

In a remarkable quirk of fate, Fahey was "rediscovered" in 1994 by Spin magazine writer Byron Coley in the same way as he himself had rediscovered Skip James. Coley had written a devoted entry on Fahey for the magazine's spin-off 'Alternative Record Guide' publication of that year. Fahey was informed that he now had a whole new audience, which included alternative US bands Sonic Youth and Cul de Sac, British comedian and writer Stewart Lee and the avant-garde musician Jim O'Rourke. O'Rourke went on to produce a Fahey album, 1997's Womblife, while in the same year Fahey recorded an album with Cul de Sac, The Epiphany of Glenn Jones (Glenn Jones played in Cul de Sac — the implication of the title being that Fahey's music was Jones's epiphany). The mid-late 1990s, then, saw a flood of Fahey releases in a completely different, much harsher style than those of the sixties and seventies. At the same time an extensive re-issue programme of all his Takoma albums was underway, which Fahey characteristically denounced, describing his old compositions as "cosmic sentimentalism".

At the same time as he was delving into more experimental electric music, Fahey's passion for traditional roots music did not subside. After coming into some money upon the death of his father in 1995, Fahey used the inheritance to form another label, Revenant Records, to focus on reissuing obscure recordings of early blues, old-time music and anything else Fahey took a fancy to. In 1997, the label issued its first crop of releases, including albums by artists such as British guitarist Derek Bailey, American pianist Cecil Taylor, guitarist Jim O'Rourke, bluegrass pioneers the Stanley Brothers, Rick Bishop of Sun City Girls and slide guitarist Jenks "Tex" Carman. Revenant's most famous release would become Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton, a seven-disc retrospective of Charley Patton and his contemporaries, which won three Grammy awards in 2003.

Fahey performed in Europe in Autumn 1999, including a sell-out show at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London in September. On this tour, he showcased his interpretation of Gershwin's "Summertime", which would later appear in recorded form on his final studio recording, Red Cross, released posthumously in 2003. In 2000, the American record label Drag City published a volume of Fahey's esoteric short stories, How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life, edited by Damian Rogers with an introduction by O'Rourke.

In February 2001, just a few days before what would have been his 62nd birthday, John Fahey died at Salem Hospital after undergoing a sextuple bypass operation.

In 2006, two John Fahey tribute albums were released as a testament to his reputation as a 'giant of 20th century American music' (Byron Coley). First I Am the Resurrection featuring artists like M. Ward, Sufjan Stevens and Devendra Banhart who mainly play their interpretations of Fahey songs. A month later came John Fahey and Friends - Friends of Fahey Tribute featuring artists like George Winston, Tihn, Peter Lang, John Doan, John Renbourn, Stefan Grossman, and Mark Lemhouse playing their own compositions inspired by John Fahey, plus a track from the last acoustic recording session John Fahey ever did.

Discography

External links

 

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