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, 1939–2001) was an American guitarist and composer, and one of the first guitarists to perform solo instrumental steel-string acoustic guitar. His music was described as American Primitivism, drawing 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.
Career
John Aloysius Fahey was born on February 28, 1939, 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 a friend. 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 Bela Bartok. 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 discovered he disagreed with much of the program's curriculum and was equally unimpressed with Berkeley's 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 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 in grad school, 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."
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 addition to his own creative output, Fahey expanded the Takoma label, discovering fellow guitarists Leo Kottke 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, selling more than 500,000 copies. Fahey eventually sold Takoma to Chrysalis Records in the mid-'70s.
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. He was informed that he now had a whole new audience, which included Sonic Youth and the avant-garde Jim O'Rourke. A new flood of releases followed, 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 obscure artists such as British guitarist Derek Bailey, American pianist Cecil Taylor, composer Jim O'Rourke, bluegrass pioneers the Stanley Brothers, and slide guitarist Jenks "Tex" Carman. Revenant's most famous release is "Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues", a seven-disc retrospective of Charley Patton and his contemporaries, which won three Grammy awards.
This however was a posthumous success as 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, a John Fahey tribute album, I Am the Resurrection was released featuring artists like M. Ward, Sufjan Stevens and Devendra Banhart.
Discography
- 1959 Blind Joe Death
- 1963 Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes (1st edition)
- 1964 The Dance of Death and Other Plantation Favorites
- 1965 The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death
- 1966 The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party and Other Excursions
- 1967 Days Have Gone By; Requia
- 1968 The Yellow Princess ; The Voice of the Turtle ; The New Possibility
- 1970 America (full version released 1998)
- 1972 Of Rivers and Religion
- 1973 After the Ball ; Fare Forward Voyagers (Soldier's Choice)
- 1974 Old Fashioned Love
- 1975 Christmas with John Fahey Vol. 2
- 1977 The Best of John Fahey 1958-1977
- 1979 John Fahey Visits Washington D.C.
- 1980 Yes! Jesus Loves Me ; Live in Tasmania
- 1981 Railroad
- 1982 Christmas Guitar Volume I (A rerecording of The New Possibility)
- 1983 Let Go ; Popular Songs For Christmas and the New Year
- 1985 Rain Forests, Oceans and Other Themes
- 1987 I Remember Blind Joe Death
- 1989 God, Time and Causality
- 1990 Old Girlfriends and Other Horrible Memories
- 1991 The John Fahey Christmas Album
- 1994 The Return of the Repressed (all previously released)
- 1996 Double 78
- 1997 The Mill Pond (Double EP) ; City of Refuge; Womblife ; The Epiphany of Glenn Jones
- 1998 Georgia Stomps, Atlanta Struts and Other Contemporary Dance Favorites
- 2000 Hitomi
- 2003 Red Cross
- 2005 On Air