fahey week 2018 day one - john fahey and the dance of death

horsemouth begins it with his thoughts on a ‘radio’ documentary - an interview about fahey’s life and work by nicholas thompson, the editor-in-chief of wired, former editor of newyorker.com, an avid fingerstyle guitarist, with steve lowenthal, the author of dance of death: the life of john fahey, american guitarist.

this is a very useful interview because it shows how wide the church of fahey fans is - these two dudes profoundly do not get it. their main problem is that they find his alcoholism and indifference to success perplexing - everything must be judged against the yardstick of money and success (or fall into that aesthetic catch-all weird). they find themselves drawn to fahey’s work - but he’s not as good, they tell us, as leo kottke, michael hedges, william ackermann etc. - the guitarists they really admire, clean, upstanding technically proficient guitarists. and so they treat his memory with a degree of rubber gloved embarrassment.

fahey's disdain for the folk scene gets some approval, as do his record collecting trips to the south when he was young (hey those things are valuable, what a smart guy), as does his rediscovery of classic blues singers (skip james - live human being - seamlessly brought in with the records), as does his making of a christmas album (see smart commercial move).

but the moves that were not smart they find dark and disturbing - even when (in the era of kurt cobain and daniel johnson as they frame it) being some kind of an outsider artist was a viable strategy in the music industry, fahey would not do it, moving to salem oregon, living in a welfare hotel, ill, alcoholic, eventually dying, listen to the pun in this, of complications from a sextupal bypass.

and yet there is something in fahey’s playing that reaches them (indeed something in playing fingerstyle guitar that reaches them - beyond merely being good at it) but they cannot quite see clearly what it is.

there’s some bandying by steve lowenthal of the term ennui - for which horsemouth reads dread, world-weariness. and yet, even as it discusses fahey’s distance from the blues, the music that black people produced as a result of their experiences in america, it is a show that fails to mention black people. and yet it is in this music that fahey found the expressive material to deal with his own dysfunction (as lowenthal puts it). and it is only in terms of this dysfunction that fahey’s story can be told.

but this is not the only source of fahey’s routine - there is also an avant-garde, modern classical music root that is similarly difficult to re-incorporate into a philistine world of mere success. steve felt inspired to write this autobiography (after writing his doctoral thesis on fahey) because in the liner notes to one of his albums (the transfiguration of blind joe death) fahey had imagined a doctoral thesis writer in 2010 writing about a little known guitarist - one john fahey. just as fahey hid behind the name blind joe death for half his first album (itself simultaneously an engagement with the myth of the bluesman and a parody on it), so he could hide behind parodies of earnest liner notes and ethnomusicologist’s doctoral theses.

it’s a good routine but sometimes horsemouth is not sure that everyone gets it (and on the other hand there’s no point explaining a joke).


the dance of death and other plantation favourites

this was how fahey titled one of his albums - what was safely immured in history (and european history at that) comes back home.

george sand begins her the devil’s pool with an account of seeing an illustration from hans holbein (the younger)’s the dance of death. a ploughman ploughs a field but death capers alongside him as he does - as he does in all the other illustrations, as cup-bearer to the drinkers etc.

these were meant to remind the medieval body politic that all were subject to death equally - and to warn them of the vanity of earthly life and the necessity of attending to their religious duties. george sand (from somewhere nearer our time) points out that this memento mori was all slightly futile - and yet the form of the argument has returned to us as we (or novelists of sand’s time) threaten the rich (in novels) with visions of their future executioners.

 ‘we prefer the sweet and gentle characters which can attempt and effect conversations to the melodramatic villains who inspire terror; for terror never cures selfishness but increases it... I have allowed myself to be drawn into this digression for the sake of a labourer; and it is the story of a labourer which I have been meaning to tell you...’

fahey’s strategy relies on two things - one is a classical treatment of folk and blues themes derived from ralph vaughan williams/ bela bartok, the other is a respect for the playing ability and technical innovations of an earlier generation of blues musicians. fahey is not interested in turning this into propaganda for social justice  immediately (like the folkies) but is interested in it as music as something with the power to reach into the human soul.