John Fahey (1939–2001)

Born in Washington, D.C. in 1939 and raised in Takoma Park, Maryland, John Fahey bought his first guitar from a mail-order catalogue in 1952. A passionate collector of 78 rpm records, he discovered 1920s blues when he heard Blind Willie Johnson, a revelation he compared to a religious conversion. His playing blends the picking patterns of those old records with the dissonances of the twentieth-century composers he admired, such as Charles Ives and Béla Bartók.

In 1959, with no record company interested, he released his first album, Blind Joe Death, himself, on a label he named Takoma after his home town. Then came Death Chants, Breakdowns & Military Waltzes (1963), The Dance of Death & Other Plantation Favorites and The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death (1965), followed by the sound collages of Days Have Gone By (1967) and Requia (1967). Takoma also launched Leo Kottke, Robbie Basho and the pianist George Winston. His Christmas album The New Possibility (1968) remained his best seller.

The 1980s were hard (illness, poverty), but a new generation of musicians rediscovered him in the 1990s; he then founded the Revenant label, devoted to early blues and old-time recordings. He died in Salem, Oregon, in 2001.

His own compositions (“Sunflower River Blues”, “The Last Steam Engine Train”, “America”…) are protected by copyright, so they are not reproduced on this site. Instead, you will find public-domain tunes he recorded, arranged in his style: Silent Night, Joy to the World, We Three Kings, Good King Wenceslas and Auld Lang Syne (The New Possibility, 1968), My Grandfather’s Clock (Days Have Gone By, 1967) and Amazing Grace (sessions for America, 1971). The studies Raga in open D and Lament in D are original pieces “in his manner”.