I had an undergraduate professor of 20th century American poetry from whom I certainly learned a lot about poetry, but who I remember most vividly for 2 things: (1) indirectly calling me out on the last day for coming to class high, & (2) turning me on to John Fahey. The 2 things ended up working together in a way I wasn't expecting, if you catch my drift.
I received this CD as an Xmas gift & immediately dove into the esoteric world of Fahey. I learned that he recorded & released his 1st album 3 separate times: first in 1959, then in 1964, & again in 1967. The Legend of Blind Joe Death contains the 1964 & 1967 versions back to back (the former was only partially rerecorded, so 7 tracks are from the '59 sessions), so by listening to the CD front to back you essentially get the same record twice. The album consists entirely of instrumental solo guitar performances--sounds like it could be dry, but Fahey does more with 6 strings & 2 hands than most people can do with all the MIDI in the world at their disposal.
The 1st & 2nd times the album was issued, Fahey attributed 1 side of the record to "Blind Joe Death," putatively an old African-American bluesman who was Fahey's mentor. By the time of the 1967 reissue, this conceit was dropped. Today, sensitive as I am to the politics of artists misrepresenting themselves as being of different ethnicities (I'm thinking of Michael Hudson, a white poet who published as Yi-Fen Chou, claiming to be a Chinese woman; Ghost Bath, the metal band who also claimed to be from China; or Brother Ali's coy replies when asked about his race early in his career), I have to wonder what motivated Fahey to pull this trick. The eccentric guitarist was known for his absurd sense of humor, so it might have simply been a whim. But I have to imagine that in a genre as concerned with "authenticity" as blues, Fahey might have thought it would benefit him to pretend some proximity to Blackness.
Context aside, the music on this album was a revelation to me about how much could be done with an acoustic guitar. Fahey built his compositions & arrangements around familiar blues, Appalachian folk & old-time music idioms, but added an avant-garde embrace of dissonance & a unique fingerpicking style of his own creation. There is a mathematical precision to his arrangements & performance--each finger is an independent member of the carefully nested ensemble--but somehow he manages to play with an emotional looseness that ensures the technical brilliance never comes across as showy--witness the sudden ritardandos of "Desperate Man Blues" (which are gone on the 1967 rerecording). The original album only reached a handful of ears in 1959, but what they heard through the hissy murk--like the melodic & bass lines weaving around each other to create unexpected rhythmic & harmonic juxtapositions in "I'm a Poor Boy A Long Ways From Home"--must have been headspinningly beautiful, because they remain so today. Then there's the pendulous atonal suspension of his "John Henry" arrangement & the hypnotic pastoral textures of "Sligo River Blues." When you realize that pretty much everything is built atop the same rhythmic foundation, it makes the complex harmonies of songs like "Sun Gonna Shine In My Back Door Someday Blues" even more astonishingly avant-garde. His picking technique, though strange & unorthodox, is so enveloping that by the time he pulls out a few strums on "The Transcendental Waterfall," the listener is surprised to have forgotten that guitars can be strummed.
A compilation featuring what is essentially the same album twice would be boring if it weren't so fascinating to compare the 2 versions on the basis of Fahey's improved playing, subtleties of tone & mood, production & feel. The 1967 recording has a more trebly sound that gives his higher strings a bell-like tone, without sacrificing the crashing sound of his heavy thumb on the bass strings. Fahey's main motivation for rerecording the album twice was that he felt his playing had improved. I don't disagree with him, but that doesn't mean every song is better in the later versions. "Poor Boy" works better in its earlier incarnation; the increased precision of the later recording actually works against it. On the other hand, the tentative serenity of "Uncloudy Day" works better in the later recording. You can't really play something well until you understand it, & I get the feeling Fahey was still trying to understand the push & pull of emotion that suffuses his arrangement.
But the best argument for the later recording is the record's showstopper: "In Christ There Is No East Or West." Each time he recorded it, this arrangement got faster, clearer & more confident. The bluegrass-like picking of the 1967 version is 2 minutes & 43 seconds of concentrated guitar brilliance. If you're reading this & want a sample, start there. After you're done smashing the replay button, I imagine you'll seek out some more Fahey.
I don't consider myself a guitar player, even though I know how to play the guitar. Nonetheless, I acknowledge this record as one of the greatest pure guitar albums ever made. No, I don't feel great about heaping such praise upon a guy who invented a fictional Black bluesman early in his career in the hopes that it would give him some kind of cache, but it's even more tragic in how unnecessary it was. The music would speak for itself, & though its influence took a while to take hold (apparently Fahey spend the 1990s floating between homeless shelters & hotels), it ended up completely revolutionizing the acoustic guitar. Thank you, poetry professor who shall remain nameless. Introducing me to Fahey was one of the coolest things you did, but you really shouldn't have let it slide when I called Louise Glück a MILF.
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