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Last Active 12-26-22 12:27 pm
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| | The Spirituality of John Fahey | | 10 |  | John Fahey
The New Possibility: Faheys Guitar Soli Christmas
The permeation of the sacred into the life of the man who chooses God isn’t as instantaneous as prosperity gospel hucksters might have the penitent masses believe. The shift from an epistemology rooted in temporal, observable reality to one rooted in a nonrational, divine revelation, or more accurately, the internalization of that nonrational revelation, is closer to a birth than a snap decision, a process inseparable from agony, struggle and doubt that ultimately delivers what John Fahey himself would call (quoting theologian Paul Tillich) “the new possibility”: an experientially different way of looking at the world drawn from a perspective that lies beyond the material and made manifest in the incarnation of the infinite into a single moment in temporal time and space. | | 9 |  | John Fahey
Red Cross
But what does all of this holy roller rumination have to do with Fahey’s music? Fahey, the cantankerous, permanently balding drunk, the irascible hippie who claimed to have cold-cocked Michael Antonioni and was known to be both a womanizer and a bit of a misogynist was, despite (or perhaps because of) his rough-hewn contempt for all artifice and pretension , first and foremost, a voice for that “new possibility”, the mystical revelation that he saw equally in the weathered hands of old blues fingerpickers and the placid eyes of Hindu gurus, a revelation that he sought to bring to fruition through his music, while simultaneously and consciously hiding it from the outward appearance of his own life, making his own Christianity a secretive, private affair. Whether its underlying spirit was drawn from the New Testament or the Rig Veda, Fahey’s music drank deep from the well of the soul, painting icons of eternity through calloused fingers, forgotten blues and empty bottles of cheap whiskey | | 8 |  | John Fahey
Requia & Other Compositions For Guitar Solo
Fahey understood the power of myth, and, true to form, both sneered at and revered it, a contempt for the frivolous use to which the cultural movements of the 60s and 70s had made of myth and spirituality belying an intensely private awe and reverence for that same consummately human expression. His first records were recorded under the persona of “Blind Joe Death”, a character concocted by Fahey as a semi-tongue-in-cheek mythologization of the blind black bluesman, a figure who “could express the intensely personal, bitter-sweet, biting, soul-stirring volk(sic) poetry of the harsh, elemental, but above all human life of the downtrodden”. Reading the liner notes of early album Death Chants, the whole thing seems more like an intricate goof than a genuine hoax; a half-sincere, half-mocking satire of the kind of mythologizing seen in the opening paragraph of this very review, and in many of the breathless accolades given to the subjects of the delta blues revival of the 60s. | | 7 |  | John Fahey
Vol. 4: The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party
Perhaps this was Fahey’s way of subtly mocking those starstruck white blues fans who would end up pillaging the work of their idols well into the 70s and beyond. Or maybe, by playing under the Blind Joe Death persona Fahey was a little bit guilty of that very same pillaging. Therein lies the paradox of John Fahey: he was at once capable of the most biting mockery of what people view as sacred and yet could express that same sacredness with an utter sincerity that could make a person weep should he know it and experience it. It’s in this paradox that we find the depth of Fahey’s humanity, if we believe that humanity is best expressed as a synthesis of the sacred and profane. | | 6 |  | John Fahey
Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes
So what could we draw from Fahey’s progressive take on the most primordial roots of American music? I would argue that he carries the legacy of figures as far flung as Blind Willie Johnson, Charles Ives and Ravi Shankar, drawing from the blood and bones of these idiosyncratic titans as only one who works out of the deepest love can and casting them into a new, pure, American folk music. I talk about love, not as the fluffy, feel good new-age pap that was so in vogue at the time, and which came to characterize much of the “new-age” guitar that sought to follow in Fahey’s footsteps, but as the heart and gut and core of the human experience when it renounces the divisions imposed by the boundaries of the mundane. | | 5 |  | John Fahey
The Yellow Princess
But then again, it could also be possible that all the cosmic soul-searching was a big goof, tongue-in-cheek, much as Blind Joe Death himself was a cosmic dig at the level of tragicomedy one can dig up from a regular guy with a guitar singing his pain to a well meaning, but ultimately pretentious audience which will never really understand him. Fahey had little time for people who wanted to look up to him as some kind of guru; he preferred to let his music and his words stand on their own, a fiercely individual artistic expression rather than some kind of creed or ethos for others to follow. | | 4 |  | John Fahey
The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death
In this sense, so much about Fahey’s work is disconcertingly opaque; one is left wondering just how much he was taking the piss with his grandiose titles and transcendental intentions, and in his old age he seems to have let on that it was all a bit more farcical than he’d wanted to admit or believe at the time. Whatever his cantankerous, often bitter sense of humor revealed about himself and his music, his personal letters seem to have revealed that on the question of faith, he was, at least, sincere, although his particular variety of Christianity seems to have been as thorny and idiosyncratic as the man himself. Ultimately, I believe that the lyrical depth, the utter reverence for its influences that his music displays is the greatest evidence possible for Fahey’s ultimate sincerity. | | 3 |  | John Fahey
Volume 6: Days Have Gone By | | 2 |  | John Fahey
America | | 1 |  | John Fahey
Fare Forward Voyagers (Soldier's Choice) | |
DadKungFu
12.18.19 | TL;DR a shitheel 60s folk guitarist, like all shitheel 60s folk guitarists, had an interest in god and stuff.
List is a ranking of (imo) Fahey's best albums. the top 5 are essential. | DadKungFu
12.18.19 | Also sorry for the pretentious wank | Let
12.19.19 | I really enjoyed it though :) |
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