JOHN FAHEY, Delta Bluesman
Bootleg recording from 1968
In April of 1968 I had the privilege to hear Delta Bluesman John Fahey, in concert at my college folk festival. The concert was held in Clothier Hall at Swarthmore College on April 5th. The other headliner on that date was Joni Mitchell, but that’s another story.
Clothier Hall was built in 1929, a neo-Gothic structure with a cavernous auditorium that was built before they thought much about the acoustics of the place. the hall was always considered to be acoustically flawed. Here’s the best picture I can find of the venue.
You can imagine the hollow echoey sound in there with a solo performer in the middle of the stage, the lights turned down, and a sort of “musty smell” heh heh. Looking back, I wouldn’t think this space would be conducive to Fahey’s blues style. But it was! I guess I was sitting in the first or second row, close enough to hear more than what was coming off the auditorium PA system and close enough to see Fahey’s face and fingers. He played the second set, after Joni. It was mysterious and a little sad and had the whole audience mesmerized. I remembered a stagehand kept refilling a coke can with what we assumed was not Coca Cola, and setting it down in front of him on stage. The music (and drinking) went on to around 11pm when the concert was supposed to end. They started packing up the sound gear, microphone, etc, but John Fahey continued to play for a small number of us, moving to the top of the stage steps as we moved closer. I don’t remember how late it went, but well after midnight. For those who don’t know about Fahey, here’s his obit from the NY Times. Read that and then at the end, listen to part of the actual concert. This is a bootleg recording, possibly recorded by the college radio station or maybe someone in the audience with ‘who knows what’ as a recorder! How this showed up on You Tube 56 years later I do not know. – bill
John Fahey, 61, Guitarist And an Iconoclast, Is Dead
By JON PARELES
Published: February 25, 2001
John Fahey, a guitarist who carved out a private corner of Americana only to see it become a foundation of new age music, died on Thursday at Salem Hospital in Salem, Ore., after undergoing sextuple heart bypass surgery, said Mitch Greenhill, the president of Folklore Productions and Mr. Fahey’s executor. Mr. Fahey was 61 and lived in Salem.
Playing a six-string acoustic guitar, Mr. Fahey used country-blues fingerpicking and hymnlike melodies in stately pieces with classical structures. Wordless and unhurried, his music became a contemplation and an elegy, a stoic invocation of American roots, nameless musicians and ancestral memories. Behind its serene surface, the music was both stubborn and haunted.
”I was creating for myself an imaginary, beautiful world and pretending that I lived there, but I didn’t feel beautiful,” Mr. Fahey said in an interview with The Wire magazine in 1998. ”I was mad but I wasn’t aware of it. I was also very sad, afraid and lonely.”
From the beginning, he was an iconoclast and a maverick. He started two independent labels. In 1959 he founded Takoma Records, which released his own albums, blues albums and recordings by other guitarists including Leo Kottke. And in 1995, he and his manager started Revenant Records, dedicated to what it called American Primitive music.
Although he didn’t sing or write lyrics, Mr. Fahey was a voluble author of liner notes. His albums were crammed with parodies of academic analysis and tales of a fictitious blues guitarist, Blind Joe Death, and his disciple, John Fahey, who purportedly ”made his first guitar from a baby’s coffin.” He shared a Grammy Award for the liner notes to the 1997 ”Anthology of American Folk Music” (Smithsonian Folkways).
Mr. Fahey was born in Takoma Park, Md., on Feb. 28, 1939. His father and mother both played piano, and his father also played Irish harp. On Sundays, the family went out to hear bluegrass and country music. Mr. Fahey said that hearing Bill Monroe’s version of Jimmie Rodgers’s ”Blue Yodel No. 7” and Blind Willie Johnson’s ”Praise God I’m Satisfied” changed his life.
He started teaching himself guitar when he was 12. He also began collecting and trading old 78-r.p.m. recordings of hillbilly songs, blues, gospel and jazz, going door to door in the rural South to find them. A fellow collector, Joe Bussard Jr., recorded Mr. Fahey on 78-r.p.m. discs for his Fonotone label, under the name Blind Thomas. In 1959 Mr. Fahey recorded his first album and pressed 100 copies, the first Takoma Records album. One side of the LP was credited to ”Blind Joe Death,” the other to ”John Fahey.”
Mr. Fahey studied philosophy at American University in Washington and then at the University of California in Berkeley, where he played at folk clubs in his first paid engagements. In 1963, he recorded his second album, ”Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes.” He and his partner in Takoma Records, ED Denson, tracked down two Mississippi bluesmen, Bukka White and Skip James, and recorded them for Takoma, bringing them to new audiences on the folk-revival circuit.
Mr. Fahey entered a graduate program in folklore at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1964, and wrote his master’s thesis about the Delta bluesman Charley Patton. After he received his degree, Mr. Fahey turned to music full time.
His compositions expanded, embracing the modalities of raga along with dissonances not found in country or blues; he used unconventional tunings and turned some traditional picking patterns backward. He also experimented with tape collages, often to the annoyance of folk fans. Though hippie listeners may have heard his music as psychedelic, he was a bourbon drinker.
Along with his Takoma releases, Mr. Fahey also made albums for Vanguard and Reprise Records. His pristine 1968 solo album of Christmas songs for Takoma, ”The New Possibility,” sold 100,000 copies initially and has been perennially reissued. Mr. Fahey spent time at a Hindu monastery in India; a 1973 album of extended solo pieces, ”Fare Forward Voyager” (Takoma) is dedicated to a guru. Takoma was sold to Chrysalis Records in the mid-1970’s, and in the 1980’s Mr. Fahey made albums for the Shanachie and Varrick labels. New age performers like the pianist and guitarist George Winston, who made his first album for Takoma, prospered with a more ingratiating solo-guitar style.
Mr. Fahey suffered setbacks in the late 1980’s. He divorced his third wife, Melody, and lost his house. He suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome and diabetes. His drinking grew worse. For a time, he lived at the Union Charity Mission in Salem. He often supported himself by scouring flea markets for used classical records to sell to collectors. He sometimes pawned his guitars.
But he was rediscovered in the 1990s. Rhino Records compiled a retrospective, ”Return of the Repressed,” in 1994, and alternative rockers working on ”post-rock” instrumental music sought out Mr. Fahey. He sobered up and restarted his career. In 1996 he released ”City of Refuge” (Tim/Kerr), followed by two albums in 1997 and one each in 1998 and 2000. He continued to experiment, playing electric and lap steel guitars and freely using electronic effects.
Last year, he published a book of loosely autobiographical stories, ‘‘How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life” (Drag City Press).
”I never considered for a minute that I had talent,” he wrote in 1994. ”What I did have was divine inspiration and an open subconscious.”
JOHN FAHEY, Delta Bluesman
Bootleg recording from 1968