![]() ![]() 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. Michaels and All Angels Church in Adelphi, Maryland, and that material would become the first Takoma record. 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. 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 1958, Fahey made his first recordings. Īs 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. Much later, Fahey compared the experience to a religious conversion he remained a devout disciple of the blues for the rest of his life. 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. Along with his budding interest in the guitar, Fahey was attracted to record-collecting. 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. ![]() 7" on the radio that ignited the young Fahey's passion for music. 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. ![]() In 1945, the family moved to the Washington suburb of Takoma Park, Maryland, where his father lived until his death in 1994. Both his father, Aloysius John Fahey, and his mother, Jane (née Cooper), played the piano. Life and career Early years: 1939–1959 Fahey and his mother, Takoma Park, Maryland, 1945įahey was born into a musical household in Washington, D.C. In 2003, he was ranked 35th on Rolling Stone magazine's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" list. Fahey died in 2001 from complications from heart surgery. He also created a series of abstract paintings in his final years. įahey 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 would later incorporate 20th-century classical, Portuguese, Brazilian, and Indian influences into his work. Fahey borrowed from the folk and blues traditions in American roots music, having compiled many forgotten early recordings in these genres. 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. John Aloysius Fahey ( / ˈ f eɪ h i/ FAY-hee Febru– February 22, 2001) was an American fingerstyle guitarist and composer who played the steel-string acoustic guitar as a solo instrument.
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