Death Chants and Breakdowns

The story of John Fahey, one of blues and folk music’s most mysterious, interesting figures, is brimming with life

Aug 15, 2024

It is very hard for instrumentalists to keep my attention through a whole song. However, guitarist and composer John Fahey does.

John Fahey remains an instrumental figure of both contemporary and historic folk and blues recordings — John Fahey recording in a studio in 1970

The life of John Fahey plays out like the tales he studied for his folklore master’s degree at UCLA. In 61 short years, he independently released some of the blues’ most moving original compositions, and opened his own successful independent label during a time when that wasn’t a thing, and most definitely wasn’t a “cool” thing yet. He found bad habits, then kicked them. He found women he wanted to marry. Then they kicked him. He traveled America (and other parts of the world) in search of the musical truth of it all. And, rediscovered not one, but two, of blues and folk music’s central figures.

This rediscovery set up two Cinderella stories still told today. And it made Fahey an instrumental figure in the 1960s blues revival, and its subsequent events, like the legendary Newport Folk Festival. Despite Fahey’s dedication to music and his far-reaching influence, research about the blues revival and the folk festival generally only include him as a passing footnote. Why does he remain such an enigmatic and underrated musical force? In part, his own dogged determination for artistic autonomy is to blame. Though he, correctly, viewed it as a virtue. The life of a true artist is anything but smooth. And a loner like Fahey isn’t going to care at all about winning a popularity contest. If anything, he’d be proud to win an unpopularity contest, then chuck the trophy in the trash if his unpopularity made him famous.

No, John Fahey is not famous in the traditional sense. But he is the most fame-worthy artist you’ll encounter, because he is the epitome of the free artist. When it comes to art, likes and follows shouldn’t matter. An artist’s aim at creative integrity should. That’s why I’m writing about Fahey, to hopefully introduce you to one of music’s most candid worker bees who never gave a dull quote in his life on the rare occasion he granted an interview.

You can’t talk about the blues, and you can’t talk about American music, without talking about John Fahey.

Bluegrass Beginnings and a Blues Baptism

Fahey was born in Washington, D.C. in 1939, and was introduced to bluegrass music as a child. When he was still young, his parents took him to see popular bluegrass acts like The Stanley Brothers live. But hearing Bill Monroe’s cover of the Jimmie Rogers bluesy classic “Blue Yodel No. 7” sparked his life-long love affair with music. As a teen, he bought his first guitar from a Sears and Roebuck catalog. Though country-western and bluegrass were initial influences, a transcendental experience with a Blind Willie Johnson song while listening to records with a friend changed the trajectory of his identity as a guitar player.

Guitarist and composer John Fahey has a story of significant struggle and admirable success — John Fahey as a child, pictured with his mother at their home in Takoma Park, MD, a suburb in Washington, D.C.

Most who love the blues discover it by way of their own transcendental experience. The genre isn’t like pop, where you grow up with it all around you and absorb it passively like a sponge and the songs become a part of your playlist routine because they serve as comfort rather than stimulation. With the blues, you either love it or you hate it. And I’ve found a correlation between people who love the blues and people who have also experienced a significant amount of trauma. When you discover the blues, and you discover you love it, you experience a spiritual healing that feels a lot like the peace that comes with praying, or being heard and actually understood by someone for the first time.

But this was no easy transcendental experience for Fahey. He was brought up in a racist household so he wasn’t allowed to listen to blues music, or any music, like gospel, recorded by black people. But when his friend played that Blind Willie Johnson record, with the song “Praise God I’m Satisfied,” as Johnson’s haunting, deep vocals filled the room, Fahey couldn’t ignore the uncomfortable, all-encompassing feeling that happens when one’s consciousness expands.

When talking about his experience, he once said:

“...we went over to this other collector's house and he put on the Blind Willie Johnson. I started to feel nauseated so I made him take it off, but it kept going through my head so I had to hear it again. When he played it the second time I started to cry, it was suddenly very beautiful. It was some kind of hysterical conversion experience where in fact I had liked that kind of music all the time, but didn't want to. So, I allowed myself to like it."

Though Fahey is a guitar player, the emotion in the bluesman’s voice is what struck him first, which is a hard thing to do. Guitarists and vocalists are often at odds with each other, both competing for the limelight. Despite Fahey’s dedication to his six-string, his keen musicianship in even his earliest days helped him pick up on one of the blues’ most unique factors—unbridled voices that howl, growl, buck, and bray. With the blues, voices aren’t always pretty, but they’re always powerful, with powerful emotions to communicate. His own favorite became Charley Patton:

"The reason I liked Charley Patton and those other Delta singers so much was because they were angry…Their music is ominous. Patton had a rheumatic heart and he knew that he was going to die young, which he did. In Son House you hear a lot of fear. In Skip James you hear a lot of sorrow, but also a lot of anger. When I first heard these guys I couldn't identify the emotions because I didn't acknowledge that I had them myself. I didn't learn the names of these emotions until I was under psychoanalysis. I played some of the records to the doctor and he said, 'These guys are as angry as hell'."

Fahey’s right. The blues can be full of anger. Anger towards economic hardship and governmental overreach, like Patton’s song “Revenue Man Blues.” Anger towards Chicago not being the paradise promised to black people who fled the South during the Great Depression in search of work and better living conditions, like Skip James’ “Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues.”

Though his connection to the blues puzzled him at the time as a teen, later in life he discovered why he gravitated towards the genre during a series of therapy sessions he attended to work through the dark, lonely days of his childhood. The source of Fahey’s anger? The sexual abuse he endured as a child at the hands of his father—abuse he spent decades trying to bury.

The blues was the catalyst Fahey needed to overcome his own prejudice, and it was therapy for his own struggles and demons before one could simply call up a psychologist's office and make an appointment to see a professional.

An Individualist Attends Berkeley

Credited as “The Father of the Delta Blues,” Charley Patton’s gravelly voice and dynamic guitar playing transfixed Fahey the most. He was so dedicated to learning everything he could about the bluesman that he chose him as the subject of his collegiate thesis. He completed it while working on his master’s degree, and the thesis has since been published by Dover. Available on Amazon, and simply titled, “Charley Patton,” the book stands as a formidable treatment concerning Patton’s musical ability and his career.

His studies took him on the road. As a young adult he drove through the neighborhoods of the South, knocking on doors to see if anyone was willing to part with their old blues records for a bit of cash. He benefited greatly from the hospitality of the South and older people in rural areas who were happy to have a visitor. A talented musician himself, Fahey also showed serious promise in being a musicologist. He was willing to travel thousands of miles and embrace grassroots tactics to track down lost bluesmen when record stores didn’t have the inventory he was looking for.

During his college days, he changed institutions multiple times. He studied at the University of Maryland for a while, then switched to American University in D.C. During this time, he also switched majors. With a keen interest in the active mind, he took up philosophy. His thoughts on his decision? He laughed and said, "It was a mistake…What I really wanted to know about was psychology, I thought I'd find what I was looking for in philosophy. . . WRONG!"

As one reporter, Edwin Pouncey, once put it, Fahey believed, “...Kant was strictly for the birds...”

I wonder, if he would have studied philosophy on his own, would he have had a better outcome? Or, maybe if he was introduced to Aristotle on his first day, who, like Fahey, grappled with the complexities and the importance of understanding reality and all it encompasses, he would have developed a different attitude about philosophy.

While working on his Patton thesis, he switched universities again, this time heading out to Berkeley in California just as the counterculture movement had a full grip on the institution. Fahey loved a lot of things the hippie movement also showed interest in—folk music, old blues records. But he didn’t think like them. Despite having a large potential audience for his own music modeled after history’s “lost” bluesmen, he couldn’t sell his music to them if it meant giving up his mind.

Pouncey stated while reporting on the philosophical outcast, “...the political beliefs espoused at Berkeley jarred violently with Fahey's idea of individualism.”

Fahey stated, “Most of the kids around Berkeley at that time were being drawn into these stupid temporary political movements by organizations that didn't even last a year. I suppose it was fashionable to be Marxist back then, but they didn't even know what Marxism was. Much less what life was really like in the Soviet Union."

Pouncey added, “If Fahey stood by one Marxist dictum, it would be Groucho's refusal to belong to any party that would have him. John Fahey is not a natural joiner…”

Pouncey summed up well the root of Fahey’s opposition to the countercultural revolution he inadvertently found himself having to navigate while struggling through finishing his philosophy degree and his work on Patton:

“Fahey's bittersweet songs of death, strummed or picked on his steel-stringed acoustic, were the ideal accompaniment for anyone who hadn't entirely bought into the 60s California dream. His adventurous juxtapositions of found sounds, snatched from old, static-ridden 78s, and his own playing opened up the 60s to the wounds left by earlier struggles, which no amount of hippy peace and love chanting could heal.”

The Takoma Years

Once described as “A man who never belonged anywhere,” he found a temporary home when he founded one of America’s pioneering independent record labels, Takoma Records. Valuing doing his music his own way more than money or fame, owning his own label put artistic freedom at the top of the company’s food chain.

Fahey comes across as a serious man, especially when it comes to music, but he couldn’t help his devilish side as he watched the blues revival of the 1960s gear up. The movement brought about a lot of people who deemed themselves experts on what had recently come back en vogue, though Fahey had already been studying it during a time when blues and folk were such marginal genres he had to go door to door in the South to find records. Because the genres were back in fashion, the purists and traditionalists were in full swing. To them, since they were self-described experts on blues and folk, they felt the genres should be kept historically accurate even as new recordings were being made. For Fahey, a musical risk-taker and experimentalist, this linear way of thinking bothered him.

During a night of imbibing with his buddies, they came up with a clever plan. Fahey would record a set of blues music in the old stylings of the Delta pioneers. Takoma would even press the music onto vintage 78 vinyl. Then, they’d release it as found music and send it to experts, reviewers, and record shops. Fahey’s first pen name? Blind Thomas.

The ruse didn’t make front page headlines. But in the world of blues and folk connoisseurs, it made waves. For a while, serious music lovers walked around trying to track down what happened to “Blind Thomas,” this lost bluesman from the Mississippi Delta. Fahey then went a step further, taking a page out of his mythology and folklore training from college and created his most complete alter ego yet, Blind Joe Death.

While he did have fun messing with the gatekeepers of America’s blues and folk resurgence, the myths he created around characters like Blind Thomas and Blind Joe Death contained artistic purpose. For Blind Joe Death, he spoke with radical candor and said:

"The whole point was to use the word 'death'...I was fascinated by death and I wanted to die. I probably could have told you that at the time, but I wasn't being that honest. Blind Joe Death was my death instinct. He was also all the Negroes in the slums who were suffering. He was the incarnation, not only of my death wish, but of all the aggressive instincts in me…Initially he was everything that had to do with life and death that a person in our society is not supposed to feel. You're not meant to feel miserable in American society, you're supposed to keep the smile up. With Blind Joe Death I was secretly throwing hatred and death back in the faces of those people who told me I was bad and sinful because I had these feelings."

Though he spent much of the late ‘50s impersonating his mythological alter egos from a musical standpoint, by 1963, he was releasing music under his own name. His second album, Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes was a surprise success for his plucky Takoma label. His breakout album kickstarted a career in roots music genres like folk, blues, country-western, and Americana.

Rediscovering “Lost” Bluesmen

For Fahey, “roots music” is “a living, breathing thing rather than a museum piece.” In 1964, he brought one relic out of the metaphorical blues museum. His rediscovery of Skip James, one of the Delta’s most haunting voices and original guitar players, meant the aging bluesman finally got the career his music deserved. Fahey and a few friends tracked him down after coming across his music, and found him in a hospital in Tunica, Mississippi. While Fahey’s discovery of James’ whereabouts sparked the old bluesman’s career, culminating in a legendary performance at the historic Newport Folk Festival in 1964, their surprise meeting at the Tunica hospital left Fahey feeling deflated.

He said of the late James, “...the first time we met him he said, 'So you guys have heard some of my records, the ones that were made in 1931?' We told him we had and he said, 'Gee, it sure took you a long time to get here, you can't be very bright. Well, it was nice of you fellows to risk your lives, spend all those years and all that money looking for me. I can understand why you did that, because I really am a genius. Well, goodnight now.'” He continued, “Before we met I was in awe of him…It was a shattering experience. I was very young and naive. The main reason I tried to find him was to learn his guitar tuning."

Despite the two not hitting it off, Fahey’s Takoma label released a batch of Skip James songs, and the record was a success. It kickstarted James’ final act, a successful performing career that lasted until his passing in 1969.

When Fahey discovered the whereabouts of another one of his blues favorites, Bukka White, in Memphis, his encounter with the hospitable blues musician changed his opinion of the old saying, “Never meet your heroes,” after his encounter with James.

Fahey said of White as he looked back on his recording sessions with him, “He was an angel…He was helpful and friendly, a very gregarious person. He was also very intelligent and imaginative, which would show up in the lyrics to his songs. He liked to play story games, where everything in the world might show up. I wish I had taped them, they were really surreal…”

Shades of Gray

Fahey’s own blues recordings are some of the most unique out there. He plays with alternate tunings, has his own unique picking patterns, and strings parts of songs together in a way I think will never be repeated. His academic training meant he’d blend classical music with his own intense study of the Delta blues. For the genre-defying Fahey, no influence was off limits. His professional career intersected at a time when liner notes got just as much wear and tear as the records they came with. Influences he listed over his time recording range from classical references and one of America’s founding songwriters, Stephen Foster, to eastern sounds associated with “Asian mysticism,” and TS Eliot.

John Fahey was the pioneering figure behind America's Primitive Guitar genre — Fahey performing in Paris, France in 1984

In his later years, he took advantage of the alternative wave of the ‘90s, experimenting even more with his sound and going electric despite the acoustic-centric mentality of his early, traditional Delta blues work.

With a prolific recording career (36 albums of John Fahey music have been released over the years), a pioneering business career as an independent label owner, and a discoverer of two of the blues’ most treasured musicians in Skip James and Bukka White, one has to ponder why Fahey is so often a footnote among the blues and folk revival scene of the ‘60s when, behind closed doors, and many times on stage, he clearly helped spearhead it.

The answer once again is found in his opposing philosophical tendencies. The revival was fueled by musicians like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and ethnomusicologists like the Lomaxes. The undercurrent of much of the folk music of the ‘60s had a protest element to it, especially after Bob Dylan had so much success when labeled a “protest songwriter.” While Dylan had to partly embrace the label, he also expressed his dismay with the title because he didn’t write the songs as “protest” songs in the first place. While most were embracing the political side of the music movement, and cheering when it was introduced into the music more and more, Fahey rebelled. For him, the politicization of music felt inauthentic. According to The Wire interview with Pouncey, “He'd simply seen too much on his record-hunting field trips in the South to accept the protestors' black and white view of the world.”

For him, when it came to politics, he wanted nothing to do with “the left or the right.”

A Close Encounter with “The Family”

One of his most jaw-dropping stories comes from his days at Takoma, which he ultimately sold to Chrysalis Records in 1981 after the recession of the 1970s and the music industry’s subsequent shrinking of the indie label pool.

As the Takoma label grew, Fahey moved the outfit from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles, California. While working one day with the Takoma staff in 1969, several young girls stopped by with a demo tape for them to listen to. When the staff asked them what they called themselves, they said, “The Family.” They casually shared with them that they lived on a ranch, and invited them out to the property. Due to a sizing discrepancy with their demo and the office’s tape recorder, they couldn’t play their music. That didn’t matter to the girls though. While Fahey wandered off and got back to work, the girls stayed behind with other members of the staff and engaged in a little elicit soiree.

Months later, when news broke about the Sharon Tate murder and the girls of Charles Manson’s “The Family” commune who were responsible for it, Fahey almost couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Manson was a so-called aspiring musician. Had Fahey had the right tape size that day, would he have heard Manson’s eerie voice singing through the speakers?

The Legacy of a True Artist

Like the blues musicians before him, age caught up to Fahey quicker than others with more peaceful lives. After a few album flops, many artists would have caved under the weight of what others would view as failure. But for the innovative Fahey, who released albums ranging from “Southern fried” and “Dixieland” to “experimental,” they stood as a good “learning experience.”

He followed that statement up with a line most creative artists can feel in their bones if they’ve ever dealt with the corporate side of the music industry:

“It’s like every time I wanted to do something other than play guitar I got castigated.”

Followers of Fahey are driven by, “a desire for music that emerges from and addresses real experiences rather than a marketing man's business plan.”

And as far as his legacy goes, he’s remembered as a man and musician who was, “Furiously individual in his approach to both art and commerce…”

Like the pioneering blues artists he studied so intensely, Fahey became known as the pioneering figure of “American primitive guitar.” While the name implies artistic minimalism like Fahey brilliantly invokes, the term “primitive” can also be applied to the countercultural, hippie movement he was so at odds against. Despite the classification, Fahey’s musical chops and philosophical chops are anything but primitive.

In 1981, Fahey moved from Los Angeles, California to Salem, Oregon. As his career waned, so did his relationships, and health. After multiple divorces, he contracted the Epstein-Barr virus. As he battled chronic fatigue from the virus and an addiction to alcohol, yet-to-be-diagnosed diabetes took its toll on his body as well.

By the time The Wire’s pivotal interview with the elusive musician happened, Fahey was living in a motel. Before his passing from complications due to surgery in 2001, he spent his time selling records, writing, and painting.

When Fahey reflected on his playing style he once said, “Sometimes I make so-called mistakes, but it's a lot more fun than playing this standard three minute song over and over again."

There’s a Charles Bukowski quote that reminds me of Fahey. The L.A. poet once said about writers: “Writers are desperate people. And when they stop being desperate, they stop being writers.”

I personally think this applies to artistry in general. And Fahey was definitely an artist. Only an artist like Fahey, who was so desperate to face the reality of his mortality at such a young age, could produce music in such a way that makes you appreciative, not fearful, of being alive the second you hear it.

From start to finish, from John Fahey to Blind Thomas and Blind Joe Death then back to John Fahey again, it was always all about the art—and having a little fun playing in between. His legacy serves as a good reminder. It’s okay if you make a few mistakes along the way, as long as you’re reaching for your own standard. And, like the iconic David Bowie once advised, that standard always stays just out of reach.

So you keep reaching.

Check out a sampling of some of my John Fahey favorites below: