John Fahey (musician)

John Aloysius Fahey (February 28, 1939 – February 22, 2001) was an American fingerstyle guitarist and composer who played the steel-string acoustic guitar as a solo instrument.

His style has been enormously influential and has been described as the foundation of the genre of American primitive guitar, a term borrowed from painting and referring mainly to the self-taught nature of the music and its minimalist style.

Fahey borrowed from the folk and blues traditions in American roots music, having compiled many forgotten early recordings in these genres.

He would later incorporate 20th-century classical, Portuguese, Brazilian, and Indian influences into his work.

Fahey was born into a musical household in Washington, D.C. in 1939.

Both his father, Aloysius John Fahey, and his mother, Jane (née Cooper), played the piano.

In 1945, the family moved to the Washington suburb of Takoma Park, Maryland, where his father lived until his death in 1994.

On weekends, the family attended performances of the top country and bluegrass acts of the day, but it was hearing Bill Monroe's version of Jimmie Rodgers' "Blue Yodel No. 7" on the radio that ignited the young Fahey's passion for music.

In 1952, after being impressed by guitarist Frank Hovington, whom he met while on a fishing trip, he purchased his first guitar for $17 from a Sears, Roebuck Catalog.

Along with his budding interest in the guitar, Fahey was attracted to record-collecting.

While his tastes ran mainly in the bluegrass and country vein, Fahey discovered his love of early blues upon hearing Blind Willie Johnson's "Praise God I'm Satisfied" on a record-collecting trip to Baltimore with his friend and mentor, the musicologist Richard K. Spottswood.

Much later, Fahey compared the experience to a religious conversion; he remained a devout disciple of the blues for the rest of his life.

In 1958, Fahey made his first recordings.

These were for his friend Joe Bussard's amateur Fonotone label and were recorded under both the pseudonym "Blind Thomas" and under his own name.

In 1959, Fahey recorded at St. Michaels and All Angels Church in Adelphi, Maryland, and that material would become the first Takoma record.

Having no idea how to approach professional record companies and being convinced they would be uninterested, Fahey decided to issue his first album himself, using some cash saved from his gas station attendant job at Martin's Esso and some borrowed from Donald W. Seaton, an Episcopal priest at St. Michaels and All Angels.

Thus was born Takoma Records, named in honor of his hometown.

One hundred copies of this first album were pressed.

On one side of the sleeve was the name "John Fahey"; on the other, "Blind Joe Death"—a humorous nickname given to him by his fellow blues fans.

He attempted to sell these albums himself.

Some he gave away, some he snuck into thrift stores and blues sections of local record shops, and some he sent to folk music scholars, a few of whom were fooled into thinking that there really was a living old blues singer called Blind Joe Death.

It took three years for Fahey to sell the remainder of the records.

After graduating from American University with a degree in philosophy and religion, Fahey moved to California in 1963 to study philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Arriving on campus, Fahey, ever the outsider, began to feel dissatisfied with the program's curriculum.

He later suggested that studying philosophy had been a mistake and that what he had wanted to understand was really psychology.

He was equally unimpressed with Berkeley's post-Beat Generation, proto-hippie music scene, loathing in particular the Pete Seeger–inspired folk-music revivalists he found himself classed with.

Eventually, Fahey moved south to Los Angeles to join UCLA's folklore master's program at the invitation of department head D. K. Wilgus, and received an M.A. in folklore in 1966.

Fahey's master's thesis on the music of Charley Patton was later published by Studio Vista in 1970.

He completed it with the musicological assistance of his friend Alan Wilson, who later joined Canned Heat.

While Fahey lived in Berkeley, Takoma Records was reborn through a collaboration with Maryland friend ED Denson.

Fahey decided to track down blues legend Bukka White by sending a postcard to Aberdeen, Mississippi; White had sung that Aberdeen was his hometown, and Mississippi John Hurt had been rediscovered using a similar method.

When White responded, Fahey and ED Denson decided to travel to Memphis and record White.

These recordings became the first non-Fahey Takoma release.

As his guitar-playing and composing progressed, Fahey developed a style that blended the picking patterns he discovered on old blues 78s with the dissonance of 20th-century classical composers he loved, such as Charles Ives and Béla Bartók.

Fahey spent many of his later years in poverty and poor health, but enjoyed a minor career resurgence in the late 1990s, with a turn towards the avant-garde.

He also created a series of abstract paintings in his final years.

Fahey died in 2001 from complications from heart surgery.

In 2003, he was ranked 35th on Rolling Stone magazine's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" list.

In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Fahey as 40th greatest guitarist of all time.

These recordings, individually pressed in very small runs, were reissued in 2011 as a box set under the title Your Past Comes Back To Haunt You: The Fonotone Years 1958–1965.