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Beyond | By Bill meyer
John Fahey
dust-to-digital
Fahey Collection Offers Early Picture
Of American Original
John Fahey, who originated the folk-rooted
American Primitive style of guitar playing during
the ’50s and enjoyed a late-career renaissance
as a founding father of a pan-stylistic
American underground, said that he didn’t
want his earliest recordings for the Fontone label
to be released while he was alive. Those recordings,
which are finally seeing release a decade
after Fahey’s death in February 2001 on
Your Past Comes Back To Haunt You (The
Fonotone Years 1958–’65) (Dust-To-Digital
21; 73:46/67:32/62:13/59:38/67:07 HHHH),
almost didn’t come out at all. The project was
repeatedly derailed by business and technical
disasters. But this set, which includes 115
tracks on five CDs and a superb hardcover
book with early photographs, a 1967 interview
with Fahey, reminiscences by old acquaintances
and a studious evaluation of his techniques,
is more than a trove of juvenilia for Fahey fanatics.
It delineates the evolution of a unique artistic
consciousness that has exerted an ongoing
influence creative American music for more
than half a century.
When the teen-age John Fahey first picked
up a guitar in the ’50s, America’s vast trove of
country blues, old-time music and older jazz
recorded between the world wars was nearly
invisible. That music was poorly represented
on the new LP format and was found mainly
canvassing door-to-door in poor neighborhoods
for 78 rpm records, or by trading with
other enthusiasts. While record-hunting Fahey
fell in with Joe Bussard, who not only bought
and sold used 78s but cut new ones into acetate
with a lathe in his basement and sold them
on his Fonotone label. He repeatedly coaxed
the young Fahey into that basement and released
about two thirds of the box’s tracks on
on 45s, 78s and cassettes that he made one at
a time between 1958 and the early ’80s.
Some of the performances on Your Past
Comes Back To Haunt You are revelatory,
others simply delightful, but a few are hard to
take. Fahey spent most of his career playing
solo instrumentals, but Bussard encouraged
him to sing like an old bluesman and then
spoofed his catalog customers by claiming
they were authentic race records by a previously
unknown blues singer. It’s not hard to
see why Fahey gave up singing, or why he
didn’t want anyone to hear this stuff. His delivery
of Charley Patton’s “Mississippi Boweavil
Blues” apes the Mississippi bluesman’s tone,
but comes nowhere near his agile phrasing. At
some point Fahey figured out that his playing,
which merged blues and hillbilly licks learned
from 78s with the dissonance and tonal colors
of classical music, was far superior to his singing;
after that, he let his fingers do the singing.
But before he did so, Fahey made the four-part
“Blind Thomas Blues,” a hilarious, take-noprisoners
parody of a talking blues in which
Fahey boasts about his tuning and his ability
to give everyone in sight the blues. He hoots
lines like “Here comes Big Jean-Paul Sartre,
and he’s got the blues, too” over Robert Johnson-like
slide figures. This isn’t just a sophomoric
prank, it’s a shameless appropriation of
the blues and wholesale re-imagining of their
potential. And isn’t theft what great composers
do
As preposterous as it might have seemed
for a teenager recording off-kilter send-ups of
obscure folk artifacts to conceive of himself
as a composer, that’s exactly what Fahey became,
and Your Past Comes Back To Haunt
You is all about him figuring out what kind of
a composer he would be. It shows him trying
and discarding alliances with other singers,
then working through the influences of figures
like Blind Willie Johnson, Sam McGee, W.C.
Handy and Blind Blake, and ultimately applying
their techniques to deeply emotional, pungently
humorous, and often surreal instrumentals
that he would revisit throughout his career.
Fahey may have entered Bussard’s basement
a prankster, but he left it a singular, syncretic
composer capable of pulling influences from
disparate aesthetic, social, and racial spheres
into deeply personal yet universal music. DB
Ordering info: dust-digital.com
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DECEMBER 2011 DOWNBEAT 93