MetaFilter posts tagged with Fahey

O Black and Unknown Bards - Among Other Things, Regarding The White Invention of The Blues

y2karl — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:08:58 -0800

...The narrative of the blues got hijacked by rock ’n’ roll, which rode a wave of youth consumers to global domination. Back behind the split, there was something else: a deeper, riper source. Many people who have written about this body of music have noticed it. Robert Palmer called it Deep Blues. We’re talking about strains within strains, sure, but listen to something like Ishman Bracey’s ''Woman Woman Blues,'' his tattered yet somehow impeccable falsetto when he sings, ''She got coal-black curly hair.'' Songs like that were not made for dancing. Not even for singing along. They were made for listening. For grown-ups. They were chamber compositions. Listen to Blind Willie Johnson’s "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.'' It has no words. It’s hummed by a blind preacher incapable of playing an impure note on the guitar. We have to go against our training here and suspend anthropological thinking; it doesn’t serve at these strata. The noble ambition not to be the kind of people who unwittingly fetishize and exoticize black or poor-white folk poverty has allowed us to remain the kind of people who don’t stop to wonder whether the serious treatment of certain folk forms as essentially high- or higher-art forms might have originated with the folk themselves.

From Unknown Bards: The blues becomes apparent to itself by one John Jeremiah Sullivan. I came across it while browsing Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers On The Albums That Changed Their Lives. For Sullivan, that album was American Primitive, Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897 - 1939), which is my favorite CD of the year. Which came out in 2005 while I just got around to buying it this year. Foolish me. It is a piece of art in itself in every respect--all CDs should have such production values. In it, Sullivan recounts how in 1997 or 1998, he--as a junior editor at the Oxford American, fact checking an article by Greil Marcus--and John Fahey, then yet another recluse in a welfare hotel in Salem, Oregon attempted to decipher the lyrics of Geeshie Wiley's Last Kind Word Blues, which most of you may know from the soundtrack of Terry Zwigoff's documentary film Crumb. There are three or so copies and he, R. Crumb, would have one. Well, among many other things, at least one hearing of Last Kind Words is required for your Cultural Literacy Certificate. As is at least one hearing of I Got Your Ice Cold Nugrape. NuGrape - now available again at Fred Meyers and QFC here in Seattle. And here is a discussion of the lively reader response in Harper's to his interpetation of Wiley's lyric. Not wanting to spend money on assorted essays on the Smiths, Beastie Boys and Jay Z, I read Unknown Bards standing up at Borders Books. An ethically suspect practice, no doubt--as is posting the article entire in pdf form. Or in a series of comments at a thread at Jazzcorner's Speakeasy. Well, the scrupulous may pay for it at Harper's where it originally ran. Unknown Bards discusses the CD American Primitives, Vol. II and two must read books, In Search of the Blues: The White Invention of Black Music by Marybeth Hamilton and Escaping The Delta: Robert Johnson, and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald. Oh, and for the guitar players out there, here, from Guitar Seminars Dot Com, is a thread with a rough tab of Last Kind Word Blues by one Mr. Mando. For what it's worth, Marybeth Hamilton's overall thesis about the white invention of the blues sounds about right to me--and I was fascinated by her story of James McKune, the Father of Us All, to whom, more than any other person, we owe the most for the consensual reality we inhabit, and cultural construct we share, when we hear the word 'blues.'

...decades ago it was a lodging house run by the Williamsburg branch of the YMCA, and it was here, in a single room on the uppermost floor one unknowable day in the mid-1950s, that the Delta blues was born. Born, that is, in the imagination of one of the YMCA’s long-term residents, a record collector named James McKune. A journalist turned postal worker, reclusive, homosexual and alcoholic, McKune conducted his life as a long downward spiral: moving into the Y around 1940, losing job after job as his drinking intensified, and eventually ending up on the streets, where he died at the hands of a violent stranger in 1971. Yet during his years at the Y he scavenged junk shops and used record stores to build up an extraordinary collection of blues 78s. In time that collection became the driving force behind the 1960s blues revival, when white Americans and Europeans discovered - one might say invented - a tradition that they called the Delta blues, constructed out of scraps of old recordings that African-Americans had long left behind.

Oh, and for what it's worth, the title Unknown Bards comes from the James Weldon Johnson poem O Black and Unknown Bards.

Wrath of the Grapevine: The Roots of John Fahey

y2karl — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 12:33:04 -0800

So, about 9 months ago I started working on this compilation... Until yesterday, however, I hadn't seen a tracklist from the mysterious 10-cd set called the VrootzBox, so this is not a derivative work, however similar it may be...I should mention that not all of these songs are songs that he covered or copped licks from. Most of the music he has made mention to, though a few of the songs were recorded after his formative years and one or two he never would have heard. But they are presented to give an illustration of the styles he drew from (such as gamelan, which he grew up playing in his neighbor's back yard).

Wrath of the Grapevine: The Roots of John Fahey
via FaheyGuitarPlayers

John Fahey - Fare Forward Voyagers

y2karl — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 05:36:04 -0800

John Fahey - Fare Forward Voyagers
John Fahey - Dance Of The Inhabitants Of The Palace Of King Phillip XIV
Clips from a 2 hour performance at the Euphoria Tavern in Portland, Oregon from 1976. Among the cognoscenti at FaheyGuitarPlayers, the consensus is that these clips display Fahey in rare form on a very good night.
Apart from Fahey, Bohemia Visual Music aka Mike Nastra, the contributor of these clips, provides an interesting assortment of way too hip YouTubery offerings including, among others, Spike Jones, Dimandas Galas, Gene Krupa, Tuxedo Moon, Sun Ra, Pere Ubu and the Holy Modal Rounders.

How To Pick a Fight With y2karl

jonson — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 21:27:53 -0800

While some people like their Kottkes all modern & full of links, I'll take mine old skool. Ladies & gentlemen, the greatest 12 string slide guitarist that ever lived.

I Remember Blind Joe Death

y2karl — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:59:17 -0800

John Fahey - 1969, Part 1
John Fahey - 1969, Part 2
John Fahey - 1969, Part 3
John Fahey - 1969, Part 4
See also The Thong Club
And Previously
Via FaheyGuitarPlayers

Turtle sex, chiropractic death, and peyote under the pillow: a year-by-year account of American primitive guitar

y2karl — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 19:32:48 -0800

...Record collectors are typically thought of as irascible loners, but in the Washington of the ’50s and early ’60s, there existed a group of scruffy young blues and folk fans who could’ve given the Illuminati a run for their all-seeing eyes. They thought of themselves as the guardians of a tradition the rest of the world had either forgotten or misinterpreted. They adopted fake names. They invented strange mythologies. They hatched plans to bring their favorite historical figures back from the dead--or at least back from the commercial oblivion to which the music biz had consigned them. But most of all, they inspired admiration and awe. Though they never used the term themselves, this bunch of vintage-78 obsessives was known by others as the East Coast Blues Mafia.

The Thong Club
via FaheyGuitarPlayers

y2karl — Fri, 22 Mar 2002 23:44:45 -0800

John Fahey - American Primitive Guitar. I got an e-mail from a listener about a John Fahey song I played on my show today and it prompted me to revisit his website. I've been listening to him ever since '67 or so. He died last year due to complications during a coronary bypass operation--I realized again today how I miss him. (more inside)