'when the catfish is in bloom' (how bluegrass music destroyed my life)

well fahey week (featuring basho day)  is over. horsemouth hopes you have enjoyed it. 

this is another thing horsemouth loves about fahey - his song titling. broadly fahey has the difficult proposition of selling essentially very similar guitar instrumentals (album after album, short song after short song) to a largely indifferent public over and over again. but like an abstract work of art half the battle is in the titling.

'on the sunny side of the ocean' (what does that mean?),
'when the catfish is in bloom' (conflation of fish and vegetable genera, possible confusion of singulars and plurals, all going along euphoniously together to create a deliberately fake southernism),


'requiem for mississippi john hurt' (deliberate admixture of song titling procedures from western classical music with subject matter of blues musicians).
 and take the album titles
'death chants, break downs & military waltzes (1963)', 
'the dance of death and other plantation favourites'. 
'the transfiguration of blind joe death'....

 this extends to fahey's collected writings how bluegrass music destroyed my life (quality fake moral panic) and to the sleeve notes on his albums - the finest quality frontier gibberish available. his academic writing (his thesis on charlie patton) displays this also - this maybe where he learnt it, titling academic essays is an object lesson in surrealist juxtaposition.