Condition: New
John Fahey - Vol 1 / Blind Joe Death
Label: Takoma C 1002
Format: Vinyl, LP, Repress
"FAHEY LIVES‘‘‘" etched on the run-out ring
New
Country: US
Released: 2010
Genre: Folk, World, & Country, Rock
Style: Folk Rock, Acoustic
Tracklist
Selections By Blind Joe Death
A1 West Coast Blues
Written-By Blind Blake
A2 St. Louis Blues
Written-By W. C. Handy
A3 I'm A Poor Boy A Long Ways From Home
Written-By Barbecue Bob
A4 Uncloudy Day
Written-By Traditional
A5 John Henry
Written-by [Spiritual] Traditional
A6 In Christ There Is No East Or West
Written-by [Episcopal Church Hymn] Traditional
Selections By John Fahey
B1 The Transcendental Waterfall
Written-By John Fahey
B2 Desperate Man Blues
Arranged By John Fahey
B3 Sun Gonna Shine In My Back Door Someday Blues
Written-By John Fahey
B4 Sligo River Blues
Written-By John Fahey
B5 On Doing An Evil Deed Blues
Written-By John Fahey
Credits
Acoustic Guitar John Fahey
What can you say about John Fahey? Bitten early by the music bug, by age 13 he was playing a Sears & Roebuck guitar & haunting junk stores for records. Student of philosophy, psychology, and of Americana's musical roots in the earliest folk & blues traditions--from the plantation slave quarters to the Victorian parlor & guitar orchestras, from barn dances to Sunday socials, from the roadhouses to the church.
A musical archeologist, historian, author (his UCLA master' s thesis on blues pioneer Charlie Patton is considered a hallmark of blues folklore), interpreter & innovator, as well as founder of Takoma Records. The fingerpicked steel guitar became a whole new animal when Fahey wrapped his hands & mind around it. His folk traditions were by no means limited to Western roots; influences from around the globe stoked his musical forge--Brazilian, gamelan, East Indian, Indonesian, Tibetan--as well as classical & the avant garde. His early to mid-60s releases (often sold via mail order) dance from place to place, encompassing his myriad influences--a Skip James motif shifts to Bartok then on to a madrigal before morphing into an ancient reel; raga swings back to yet another blues motif--all a seemingly natural progression under Fahey's astonishingly capable fingers.
This record should be required listening for anyone interested in playing acoustic blues, and it is a magnificent place for an interested listener seeking an introduction to the genre. This record collects incarnations of Blind Joe Death, John Fahey's fictional and representative blues guitar master in varied modes and recording sessions.
Then there are additional tracks, including Fahey's "Trannscendental Waterfall" and Blind Blake's "West Coast Blues." For some that might be too much, but this is the legend after all. And this is a good place to hear the development of Fahey's special guitar voice.
Fahey began by recreating and like all original voices, found that he was creating indeed. This is a collection of blues with a spiritual or rag thrown in when the spirit strikes. You're never sure who you are going to hear--Skip James, Gary Davis, John Hurt, Pink Anderson, Robert Johnson--Delta blues, some Piedmont--a potpourri of styles. First Fahey commanded the idiom. His technique is a panoply of flat and finger picking styles, including the pattern picking with open tunings that he learned from Skip James and John Hurt.
But his uses of the techniques are sometimes surprising. Once he learned the licks, the patterns, the fingerings, he expanded for his own purposes. As the fictional Blind Joe, Fahey played some blues standards, interpreting them to suit his tastes and voice. Fahey's versions of W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues" are distinctive.
But they aren't necessarily "better," just different. The collection includes original songs such as "Poor Boy Long Ways from Town," and some arrangements of known songs like "John Henry."
When he is covering old blues songs, his recreations of the standards are convincingly authentic. In the original songs, Fahey uses the techniques, the methods of legendary figures and blends them in such a way that his originals are almost indistinguishable in style from the genuine article. This is the early John Fahey, before he diversified completely to blend the folk/blues idiom with eastern music and sonic experiments in texture and time. It is, nevertheless, a wonderful collection.
Cerebral, delicate, irrascible, wistful, earthy, contemplative, laconic, spiritual, desolate, joyous: these are the songs of an artist angry at the world because he loved it so much. All is unreconciled, all is reconciled; In Christ There Is No East or West. Through his original works, Fahey contributed some of the century's most remarkable songs:
"Sun Gonna Shine in My Back Door Someday Blues" leaps from raga to ragtime and back in what seems to be a simple conversation, until you realize the two sides are yin and yang, the same because the opposite.
"Sligo River Blues" opens with a pensive, circular phrase, then melds the uptempo rhythm of a nineteenth-century parlor song (e.g. Bicycle Built for Two) with nostalgic, melancholy chord changes--a mutually enobling sadness and beauty, a' la early Yeats.
"The Transcendental Waterfall," here in its original 10-minute length, anticipates the course of Fahey's work and life: restless, complex, dissatisfied; yearning for transcendence, finding it within the quest, not at its abrupt end; memorializing forever the young boy who, entranced by the score of the movie Thief of Baghdad, took up the guitar to recapture that lost magic.
John Fahey - Poor Boys Long Way From Home
1978 Hamburg
This is probably the most impressive folk music I've ever heard. I've never heard anyone ever play such beautiful chord melodies like that.
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