John Fahey

Blind Joe Death

John Aloysius Fahey was born in Washington, D.C., on 28 February 1939 and grew up in Takoma Park, Maryland, where his family moved in 1945. In 1952, after hearing Bill Monroe play a bluegrass version of a Jimmie Rodgers song on the radio, he bought his first guitar from a Sears catalogue for seventeen dollars. In 1958 he cut his first 78s for Joe Bussard's amateur Fonotone label, some as Blind Thomas and some under his own name.

In 1959 he recorded in St. Michael and All Angels Church in Adelphi, Maryland, and paid for about a hundred copies himself. It was the first release on Takoma, a label named after his hometown, with one side credited to Fahey and the other to Blind Joe Death. He sold copies at the gas station where he worked, mailed them to folklorists and left some in thrift stores. He studied philosophy and religion at American University and philosophy at Berkeley, then took a master's degree in folklore at UCLA in 1966 with a thesis on Charley Patton, later published as a book.

Takoma

From 1963 Fahey ran Takoma as a proper independent with ED Denson and the distributor Richard Pierce. Its first record by another artist was by Bukka White, whom Fahey had tracked down by postcard, and the label went on to launch or build the careers of Leo Kottke, Robbie Basho, Bola Sete, Peter Lang and George Winston. Kottke's 6- and 12-String Guitar (1971) sold more than half a million copies, the biggest seller Takoma ever had.

His own records came steadily: Death Chants, Breakdowns & Military Waltzes (1963), The Dance of Death & Other Plantation Favorites (1964), and for Vanguard, Days Have Gone By, Requia and The Yellow Princess. He joined country blues picking to the influence of composers such as Charles Ives and Bartok, and later to Portuguese, Brazilian and Indian music, gamelan and Tibetan chant. The style took the name American primitive guitar, a term borrowed from painting, and he is regarded as its founder.

Voyagers and railroads

Two albums for Reprise, Of Rivers and Religion (1972) and After the Ball (1973), sold poorly, and he returned to Takoma for Fare Forward Voyagers (1973). Recorded alone in Hollywood, it holds three long pieces named from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets and ends with the 23-minute title track. The record was dedicated to Swami Satchidananda, though Fahey later told Byron Coley that he had not believed in Krishna and had mostly been in love with the Swami's secretary. In 1990 he called it his greatest guitar record.

In 1979 he sold Takoma to Chrysalis. He said later that he had made the mistake of giving his employees stock, so he could not fire them, and that when Chrysalis offered to buy, he told them to take it. In 1981 he moved to Salem, Oregon, with his third wife, Melody. His last principal recording for Takoma was Railroad, a set of pieces about trains that includes Charlie Becker's Meditation. The Portland guitarist Terry Robb produced and played on several of his albums for Varrick.

Ruin and return

In 1986 he contracted Epstein-Barr syndrome, which worsened his diabetes and other health problems, and by the early 1990s he was poor, living in cheap motels and pawning guitars. In 1994 Byron Coley's Spin article The Persecutions and Resurrections of Blind Joe Death and Rhino's anthology The Return of the Repressed brought him back, and Sonic Youth, Cul de Sac and Jim O'Rourke became his champions. In 1995 he founded Revenant Records with his father's inheritance.

In 1997 came City of Refuge, Womblife, produced by O'Rourke, and The Epiphany of Glenn Jones with Cul de Sac, as well as a Grammy for his liner notes to Revenant's Anthology of American Folk Music, Vol. 4. Drag City published his book How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life in 2000. He died in Salem on 22 February 2001, aged 61, of complications after a sextuple heart bypass.

The kind of folk guitar playing equivalent of William Burroughs or Bukowski.

Pete Townshend, 2013

Legacy

Revenant's Charley Patton set Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues won three Grammys in 2003, and the Fonotone recordings he had opposed releasing came out as Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You in 2011. Rolling Stone ranked him 35th among the 100 greatest guitarists in 2003. Vintage Guitar's Michael Dregni put him in the same place on the acoustic guitar that Jimi Hendrix held on the electric. Steve Lowenthal's biography Dance of Death appeared in 2014, and James Cullingham's film In Search of Blind Joe Death in 2013.