"Upon the mountain dreary
God, I wandered sad and alone
And when my Savior found me
Well He claimed me for His own."
- Blind Willie Johnson, "Praise God, I'm Satisfied"
Listening to Blind Willie Johnson's expressive bottleneck guitar and eerie bullfrog roar is a wonderful, terrible experience.
These days you can pick up The Complete Blind Willie Johnson, a double-CD set on Columbia Records, at most well-stocked record stores. But back in the late 50s, hearing Johnson was not a common experience at all.
Black Southerners such as Johnson were recorded in the 20s and 30s by large white-run Northern record labels. Released on 78- rpm discs, these "race records" were aimed at the black record- buying public, and promoted and sold only in black communities. But the Depression put the brakes on recording, and by the time World War II ended a jumpier, electrified style of black music had captured the popular ear. The 78s gathered dust in attics and junk shops, and the artists - soon forgotten - lapsed into obscurity.
But in the 50s a new generation of fans - young whites intrigued by early country and blues - began collecting and trading the old 78s. One such collector - a Washington, D.C., suburbanite named Dick Spotswood - played a recording of Blind Willie Johnson's "Praise God, I'm Satisfied" to a young country fan, collector, and guitarist of his acquaintance, Takoma Park native John Fahey. The story goes that though Fahey hated the piece the first time he heard it, something about that record stuck with him.
Fahey became a convert, scouring junk shops and black neighborhoods for old blues 78s. He and several other scholars/fanatics journeyed to the Mississippi Delta in the early 60s, searching for some of the forgotten performers whose music they loved. He helped unearth artists such as Skip James and Bukka White, men who, like Johnson, recorded in the 20s and 30s and were then sent back to anonymity. Thanks to the then-nascent swell of interest in folk and blues, these older men developed international followings and recorded several fine albums after their "rediscoveries."
John Fahey took the lessons he learned from blues music and fused them with compositional techniques from one of his other interests, classical music. The resulting hybrid style, displayed on his 1959 debut album (released on his own Takoma Records "label"), spurred a whole new conception of solo acoustic guitar and made him one of the most influential American musicians of the last 40 years. But over the years Fahey's life and career closely followed the contours of some of his idols, perhaps too closely for comfort.
Though he was a celebrated recording musician and performer from the late 60s to the early 80s, Fahey eventually found his artistic drive undermined by having to compete with a legion of less-inspired pluckers peddling a watered down version of his style in the form of "New Age" music. At the same time, personal problems helped plunge him into obscurity as deep as that of Johnson, James and White.
Now Fahey is being "rediscovered" by a new generation of fans who have come across his older albums and been taken with his omnivorous mix of influences, astonishing technique, fierce intelligence, and mordant sensibility. Fantasy Records recently purchased the rights to the Takoma catalog and has begun reissuing Fahey's early albums, including a version of his legendary first album, Blind Joe Death. And Fahey has broken a silence of several years to begin performing and recording again.
In a way, Fahey set himself up perfectly to live a modern version of the bluesman's arc. While still kicking around the D.C. areas in the late 50s he took the advice of a local minister, who suggested that Fahey record and press his own album for a nominal fee. He recorded some of his own compositions and his versions of traditional blues tunes in 1959 and had 100 copies pressed. He printed JOHN FAHEY on one side of the plain white record sleeve and BLIND JOE DEATH, his morbid goof on the colorful names of Delta bluesmen, on the other. He was trying, he later said, to "convince people that white people could play blues too." It was also the first of many inside joke pokes Fahey would take at the reverend nature of blues nabobs: If some overeager connoisseur mistook the record's title for the name of some obscure old journeyman, well, that only added to the fun.
A few of the original 100 albums were broken during shipping. Fahey gave some of the others to friends, sent some to cognoscenti on his 78s trading list, and even sold some at his job as a night watchman at a gas station. Somehow enough people heard the album to build him a small-but-impressive reputation.
After relocating to California to go to graduate school, Fahey continued to record and release albums on Takoma, and word continued to spread. Before long he was a celebrated figure on the folk music scene, and rather than rerelease the in-demand original Blind Joe Death, he took advantage of his improved playing and rerecorded the album in 1964, then rerecorded and rereleased it again in stereo in 1967. Meanwhile the original album has taken on Holy Grail status among collectors. Now Fantasy has reissued Blind Joe Death in its fourth, and likely final, form.
Entitled The Legend of Blind Joe Death, the 21-track CD compiles the best versions of the tunes from the 1964 and 1967 recordings. Only one cut comes straight from the '59 edition - the original tapes are long lost and Fahey prefers the latter takes. (It's hard to argue with him; compare to the older material on Legend, the '67 takes are brighter, and his playing is technically crisper and more confident.) But regardless of the music's tangled provenance, it is easy to hear, even 30-plus years after the originals came out, what all the fuss was about.
People didn't play acoustic guitar like this until John Fahey came along. He took the standard instrument of country and blues - the steel-string guitar, as opposed to the gut-stringed classical model - and worked stylistic alchemy with it. He took the nimble finger-picking of country musicians and combined it with the dancing syncopation and the expressive techniques of the blues (the use of a slide and open tunings, for example). To these elements he added the harmonics ideas of 20th-century classical composers such as Bela Bartok (himself heavily influenced by modal European folk melodies) and the classically inspired ambition to create solo-guitar pieces that would outgrow the structures of conventional blues and folk forms - compositions that could stand on their own.
Now, when legions of guitarists play music that owes something to Fahey, it's easy to hear the first salvo of a revolution on Legend. Pieces such as "On Doing and Evil Deed Blues" hew close enough to the heartwood of Delta blues to illustrate Fahey's musical roots, but the dissonant runs of "Sun Gonna Shine in My Back Door Someday Blues" and the fretboard harmonics opening "Uncloudy Day" show that he was working with something more ambitious than vitrine-encased homage or trad retread. On his version of the hymn "In Christ There Is No East or West," he takes the first verse at a stately chamber-music stroll, then shifts into a dancing ragtime-ish swing on the second verse, before restating with a slower verse that is nonetheless more expressive and looser than the first - he combines country-style picking, blues phrasing, and an ad hoc version of the sonata form in less than two and a half minutes.
Fahey exhibits incredible, jaw-dropping technique throughout (especially on the '67 recordings), but he keeps his concept clear by never substituting speed and flash for strong musical ideas. A song such as "Sligo River Blues" would be more impressive from a guitar-geek standpoint if played at a quicker tempo, but the piece would lose some of the burnished beauty Fahey achieves by holding to a dignified gait, allowing the graceful bass and melody lines to dance with, rather than race against, each other.
Though he recorded more that 25 albums Blind Joe Death remains the rock upon which Fahey's church is built. His playing inspired peers such as Leo Kottke and Robbie Basho (both of whom recorded early albums on Takoma Records, which became professionally run with its founder's success). Will Ackerman took much from Fahey's example as both a player and a businessman in creating Windham Hill Records, the home of many who followed Fahey's musical path with much less inspiration.
Yet Fahey did not become a household name - he remains largely unknown, even in households with the odd Kottke or Windham Hill disc. In part Fahey is himself to blame. During the 70s Kottke's pleasant, expert playing and easygoing affability made him a minor star. By contrast, audiences that fell in love with the pastoral, rootsy aspects of Fahey's albums also had to face his more demanding musical turns - darker moods, ambitious structure, and jarring sonic experiments. In concert fans often encountered a garrulous, belligerent Fahey, whose biting humor and sardonic nature were brought out by sips from the bourbon-doped Coke at his side.
By the mid-80s Fahey's star had fallen considerably, and his albums seemed to push less and motor along more. He was also struck by a downpour of calamities: a messy divorce, a worsening drinking problem, and an extended bout with chronic fatigue, the latter courtesy of the Epstein-Barr virus. Fahey stopped recording and performing, and according to music critic and longtime booster Byron Coley, the guitarist lived for while in a welfare hotel in Salem, Oregon, making a meager living by scouring secondhand stores for rare classical albums that he resold to dealers and collectors.
It's hard to chart what exactly sparked the resurgence of interest in Fahey and his music, but his new fan base is decidedly not made up of old folkies but contemporary hipoisie attracted by the more experimental, astringent aspects of Fahey's music.
The first contemporary Fahey nod in my memory came from a Boston-based avant-garde indie band called Cul De Sac, which covered his marvelous "The Portland Cement Factory at Monolith, California" on an early-90s album. Then Rhino Records produced a well-received two-CD Fahey retrospective, The Return of the Repressed, in 1994. The album did the great service of placing the entire spectrum of Fahey's music - from early breakthroughs to mid-period rigor to mid-80s covers of sentimental tunes - back into circulation, and it remains the best introduction to his work. And Coley certainly deserves a great deal of credit for championing the guitarists's cause - he talked the editors of Spin Alternative Record Guide into including a sizable section lauding Fahey's significance; at 57 Fahey is one of the oldest living artists in the book.
Whatever the source, Fahey is now officially Hip again. Avant- garde rainmakers such as Jim O'Rourke sing his praises and cover his tunes (see "Dry Bones in the Valley [I Saw the Light come Shining 'Round and "Round]" on Gastr Del Sol's 1996 album Upgrade and Afterlife), and Fahey has been bestowed with the Thruston-Moore-Wants-to-Hang-Out-With-You Seal of Approval (the two recently did a solo tour together). This renewal of acclaim, and the resolution of a few of the things that held Fahey down in the late 80s, seem to have sparked new creative fire. The result is City of Refuge, a new album on Portland, Oregon-based Tim/Kerr Records.
The would-be disciples now seeking Fahey out seem to have influenced his creative return. Unlike his prehiatus efforts, which tended more toward pretty, pacific tunes, his latest recordings are of a piece with the textural experimentation currently going on at the fringes of rock. "Chelsey Silver, Please Come home" and "Hope Slumbers Eternal" (classic Fahey song titles both) return to the spidery blues-based probing of his middle period, as does an extended 20-minute suite, "City of Refuge I." But pieces such as "Fanfare" and "The Mill Pond" are almost overwhelmed by a mechanistic drone, as Fahey slashes at a distorted slide lick on the former and plays around with piercing detuned tones on the latter. And the closing "On the Death and Disembowelment of the New Age" (another gem of a title) is a 19- minute tape collage including train sounds, otherworldly chanting, and a lengthy section of what sounds like a swarm of tin cicadas.
In a way, however, this is nothing new for Fahey. The Voice of the Turtle, a 1968 Fahey/Takoma album rereleased by Fantasy last year (the first such reissue), features a number of extended tape collages featuring, well, train sounds and otherworldly chanting. Lengthy, probing suites are also another past Fahey tool. While his playing on the new album shows a refreshing vigor and a willingness to explore, the music seems diffused and unfocused. The blues and folk basics of his older work are not missed, but his concision and musical concentration are. The "industrial" touches - the drones, the tapes - seem slapdash, and are disconcerting coming from an artist who has always had a strong sense of tone.
It is as if Fahey has returned to the elements of his past work that new fans relish most, but has yet to figure out quite where to go from there. Fahey has a lot of catching up to do with what has happened since he stopped recording, much less since he stopped pushing his music - he is obviously interested in contemporary musical directions, but his new experiments seem like old science.
At a point where a virtuoso such as Leo Kottke has all but become the baby-boomer Burl Ives, there's a genuine charge to seeing Fahey come roaring back, as questing and uncoddling as ever. But City of Refuge just does not galvanize as much as Fahey probably intended - or as much as even a receptive listener might wish. Nonetheless it will be interesting to see what he does next.
Future work might reintegrate more of the steely assurance that helped make Fahey one of the last half-century's finest American musical explorers. After all, he has not left that part of his past completely behind. The new album's name is no doubt taken from the song "I'm Going to Run to the City of Refuge," the definitive version ow which was recorded back in the 20s by one Blind Willie Johnson.
Lee Gardner for the City Paper, February 5, 1997