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Pioneering acoustic guitarist and delta blues folklorist, creator of the Takoma record label John Fahey was born in Washington DC in 1939. His family moved to Takoma Park, a Washington suburb when he was six years old. Fahey grew up listening to the bluegrass and country music favored by his parents and became a protege of record collector, old time music scholar and radio broadcaster, Dick Spottswood, who hosted a long running program on American University’s station, WAMU, “The Obsolete Music Hour.” On a record collecting trip to Baltimore with Spottswood, Fahey discovered a recording by blues singer Blind Willie Johnson, which was a conversion experience for Fahey.

Having bought a guitar from Sears at the age of 13 to learn to play bluegrass, Fahey was inspired to learn how to play the blues like the delta artists of the 30s. His playing was never an exact copy of that had gone before, however. He incorporated many musical influences, including Charles Ives and Bela Bartok, in the sound of his “American primitive” style of guitar. Fahey recorded and issued his own album of songs in 1959, with his own name, “John Fahey” on one side and “Blind Joe Death” on the other. He had 100 copies pressed and it took him three years to sell them.

After studying philosophy at American University Fahey moved to California and entered UCLA to go for a masters degree in philosophy, but found himself in the Folklore department writing a masters thesis on blues singer Charlie Patton. During this time Fahey tracked down bluesman, Bukka White and produced an album of White’s songs, releasing it under the Takoma label, which he had created for his own first release. Fahey also recorded his own “Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes” which surprised him by outselling the White recording and launching a music career for himself.

Fahey’s Takoma record label released recordings by guitarists Leo Kottke, Robbie Basho and Peter Lang, pianist George Winston, electric blues/rock artist Mike Bloomfield, jug band and folk guitarist Rick Ruskin, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Maria Muldaur and Canned Heat. Kottke’s first album sold over 500,000 copies, enabling Takoma to have a long and prosperous run.

By the mid 70s alcoholism, diabetes and Epstein-Barr syndrome were beginning to erode Fahey’s abilities. He spent some years living by pawning his guitars and selling rare albums that he had collected from junk shops over the years. When I met his in the late 1990s his guitar playing was a mere shadow of his earlier work. He never fully recovered and died in 2001 while undergoing heart bypass surgery. We are left with his legacy of recordings and writing.

Here is an instrumental of Fahey’s “Red Pony,” performed on Laura Weber’s “Guitar Guitar” television show in 1969.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 6th, 2008 at 11:53 pm and is filed under folk, guitar, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.