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When Grammy Award winner John Fahey passed away on Feb. 22, 2001, he left behind a legacy of groundbreaking guitar styles, roots music innovations, and a generation of musicians who were inspired by his creative vision. The five years since his death have shed new light on his reputation as a giant in the blues, folk, post-punk and alternative genres, and on 20th century American music itself. Several recorded salutes to Fahey's prowess as a musical treasure have recently emerged, all of them reverential toward the both iconic and iconoclastic shadows he cast on contemporary music. But how does one best understand the man himself and offer plaudits to his abilities? Perhaps by asking his closest peers to musically explain who he was to them on a personal level. His albums always taught the listener to expect the unexpected, and this recording is no exception. Along with twelve of his famous friends, students, and disciples, Fahey himself appears with a long lost guitar track from his last ever acoustic recording session and a spoken message to his friends which will bring smiles to the faces of both his new and longtime fans. The CD is called John Fahey & Friends - Friends Of Fahey Tribute. With songs either written or inspired by Fahey, George Winston, John Renbourn, Stefan Grossman, Paul Geremia, Woody Mann, Mark Lemhouse, Tinh, Terry Robb, Mitch Greenhill, Peter Lang, Mayne Smith and John Doan lay down solid tracks with the beauty and artistry that have made them famous around the world. It's a fond farewell to the man they all considered to be a close friend. These artists have generously donated their proceeds to the non-profit Village School Foundation. When's the last time a noble cause sounded this good? "A folk-blues innovator of the 1960s who became a post-punk hero in the 1990s" - Rolling Stone "An incredibly complex individual with intellectual, mystical and creative depths that are extraordinary" - Spin “His contributions to American music are no less singular than those of some of the century’s true giants” - No Depression Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide Fahey was a colorful figure from the time he became an accomplished guitarist in his teens. Already a collector of rare early blues and country music, he made his first album in 1959, ascribing part of it to the pseudonymous "Blind Joe Death." Only 95 copies of the LP were pressed, making it a coveted collector's item today. (In the 1960s, Fahey would re-record the material for wider circulation.) In college, he wrote a thesis on Charley Patton (an exotic subject at the time). Yet Fahey did not perform publicly for money until the mid-'60s, after his third album. Fahey's early albums for Takoma in the mid-'60s laid out much of the territory he would explore. His instrumentals, filtering numerous genres of music into his own style, evoked haunting and open spaces. At times they could be soothing and plaintive; at other times they were disquieting, even dissonant. The more experimental aspects of his material even foreshadowed psychedelia in their lengthy improvisations (some cuts lasted as long as 20 minutes), use of Indian modes, unpredictable stylistic shifts, and overall eerie strangeness. His persona as a weirdo of sorts was amplified by his bizarre and lengthy song titles and liner notes. He also employed odd guitar tunings that continue to exert an overlooked influence on contemporary musicians to this day. Fahey remained consistently popular on a cult level through the mid-'80s. His most commercially successful efforts, oddly, were probably his Christmas albums, which are among the more interesting holiday records of any genre. For a time he ran the Takoma label, where he was instrumental in starting the career of Leo Kottke (who owes much of his stylistic inspiration to Fahey), as well as promoting lesser-known talents like Robbie Basho. He was a catalyst in other subtle ways, helping to form Canned Heat by introducing Al Wilson (who played on a Fahey album in 1965) to Bob Hite, and rediscovering Delta bluesman Bukka White with his friend Ed Denson. Fahey sold Takoma to Chrysalis in the mid-'70s, but continued to record regularly, and also tour (though his live performances were erratic). In 1986, he contracted Epstein-Barr syndrome, a long-lasting viral infection that, combined with diabetes and other health problems, sapped his energy and resources. Although the Epstein-Barr virus was finally overcome, the mid-'90s found him living in poverty in Oregon, where he paid his rent by pawning his guitar and reselling rare classical records. The appearance of a major career retrospective on Rhino, Return of the Repressed, in 1994 boosted his profile to its highest level in years. In 1997, he returned to active recording with City of Refuge and was planning a Revenant definitive package of Charley Patton's work when he died following sextuple-bypass surgery at the age of 61. The Fahey discography is dauntingly large and diverse; the neophyte is advised to start with the two-disc Return of the Repressed, but those who wish to dig deeper will be very pleased with Takoma's extensive reissues, which started to appear in the late nineties. ________________________________ Guitarist John Fahey, whose eccentric acoustic stylings influenced a generation of musicians, has died at Salem Hospital in Salem, OR after undergoing a sextuple bypass operation 48 hours previously. John Fahey was born on February 28, 1939 in Takoma Park, MD. His father played popular songs on the piano and Irish harp, and his mother was also a pianist. John spent his youth raising wood turtles and fishing in the Susquehawa River and upper Chesapeake Bay. On Sundays the family went to the New River Ranch in nearby Rising Sun, MD where they heard the top country and hillbilly groups of the day, like Bill Monroe and The Stanley Brothers. On a fishing trip in 1952 John met a black singer and guitarist named Frank Hovington, whose fingerpicking style so intrigued John that he bought his first guitar soon thereafter, a Sears Roebuck model that cost him $17.00, and startedteaching himself to play. After getting a B.A. in Philosophy and Religion from American University, Fahey moved to Berkeley, CA in 1963, where he established his own label, Takoma Records, and began his long recording career. The following year he moved to Los Angeles, got an M.A. in Folklore and Mythology from UCLA, and was instrumental in the rediscovery of blues artists Skip James and Bukka White. He expanded the Takoma label to includefellow guitarists Leo Kottke and Peter Lang, among many others, and New Age pioneer George Winston was another whose early career was nourished by the quirky innovator. In recent years the Takoma catalog has been purchased by Fantasy Records of Berkeley, CA, and Fahey's Takoma LPs are now being systematicallyreissued on CD. Fantasy Records executive Bill Belmont called Fahey Although Fahey preferred to be known as an American primitivist, he was widely acknowledged as the "godfather of the New Age guitar movement," and his recordings (over thirty albums for a wide variety of labels) showcased his ongoing musical explorations. Several were sonic explorations in the alternative music vein, and all had exotic titles (a 19-minute excursion was called On the Death and Disembowelment of the New Age,while another was called Old Girlfriends and Other Disasters. At the same time, he never lost his early love for traditional and roots music forms, and during the early 1990s he formed another record label, Revenant, to reissue classic recordings of early blues and old time music. At the time of his death he was working on a new album, Summertime and Other Sultry Songs. |
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