John Fahey was one of the great American guitarists of the last four decades. A truly eccentric and idiosyncratic composer, he was at the forefront of challenging how the acoustic guitar is perceived in modern music.
Incorporating the traditional basic techniques of folk and blues picking he expanded the horizons of the acoustic guitar, showing how traditional techniques could be used to create non-traditional music. Throughout his long and varied career he recorded some incredibly beautiful and affecting albums. Here is a quick overview of some of his finest.
Blind Joe Death; Takoma 1964
Fahey’s first album, released in 1964 for the record label he co-founded, is a beautiful introduction to this incredible artist. Fahey originally put out this record privately in 1959. By the time of the Takoma release, Fahey’s picking had become cleaner and more assured and his compositions from ‘59 had new life breathed into them. Blind Joe Death remains a wonderful album and displays Fahey’s ability to re-interpret the blues and folk idioms prevalent at the time in his own inimitable style.
The Dance of Death and Other Plantation Favourites; Takoma 1964
Always a great eulogiser of the traditional music of America, Fahey fully realises his own mythological idea of America in this his second solo album released in 1964. Dance of Death… has all the trappings of a folk and blues album but it nevertheless contains some of his most affecting compositions: the dark and lyrical “Wine and Roses”, the sweeping melancholic “What the Sun Said” and the frankly brilliant voodoo stomp of “Dance of Death”.
Even at this early point in his career Fahey was displaying his true originality. As well as these more experimental pieces there are more grounded tracks, displaying Fahey’s blues and country roots. First a stunning slide guitar reinterpretation of Bukka White’s “Poor Boy Long Ways from Home” and the original “The Last Steam Engine Train” later made famous by Leo Kottke.
The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death; Takoma 1965
Transfiguration… is possibly Fahey’s most rounded and fully realised album- and certainly his most essential. The album cover appears in a record shop window in one scene of Stanley Kubrik’s Clockwork Orange, and given Kubrik’s eye for detail it surely can’t have been by accident. Fahey is at the top of his game here, his picking is pristine, focussed and the music is nothing short of mesmeric. The album is both dark and playful but never dull.
The Yellow Princess; Takoma 1969
The Yellow Princess is in some ways a psychedelic record. Though Fahey himself was not truly part of that scene per se, even he had to be slightly affected by all the changes in the music scene of the late sixties. Here Fahey teams up with members of the rock band Spirit for several of the cuts, including the heartfelt “March! for Martin Luther King” and the wonderfully titled “Dances of the Inhabitants of the Invisible City of Bladensburg”.
The album houses some wonderful solo guitar works as well. The title track is a marvellously eccentric piece, “Lion” finds Fahey’s picking at its most frenetic and “View” has to be one of the most beautiful and atmospheric works of his canon.
Fare Forward Voyagers; Takoma 1974
Taking its title from T.S.Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, Fare Forward Voyagers is Fahey’s only non-Christian religious album. Dedicated in the original linear notes to Swami Satchidananda, Fahey created an album redolent of Indian Classical music containing three long raga-like tracks.
Fare Forward Voyagers was regarded by the man himself as his finest work, and who could argue with that? The three extended pieces give Fahey’s guitar room to breathe and the resulting miniature symphonies are truly fantastic.
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