'see my face from the other side' (fahey week 2019 begins)’

fahey week, as inaugurated by delta slider, the 22nd to the 28th of february, begins again for this year.

horsemouth has recently read two pieces about fahey from outside the fahey canon and he feels he should respond to them.

the first was an account of an attempt to tour late era john fahey round the uk that ended in disaster and lawsuits, horsemouth has discussed it earlier but will probably return to it.

the second is an account by john jeremiah sullivan (in a collection of his journalism pulphead - dispatches from the other side of america) of phoning up fahey in pursuit of an old blues lyric for a piece he was fact checking for greil marcus.

the record with the difficult to hear lyric was on last kind words blues,  a record that is actually a duet by geeshie wiley and elvie thomas - horsemouth has read sullivan writing on this theme before, in his excellent april 13th 2014 article for new york times magazine the ballad of geeshie and elvie 

horsemouth finds another piece by daphne a. brooks in the february 7, 2017 edition of oxford american again she hears the line differently from sullivan and fahey, she hears it as 'see my face from the other side' 

another song of theirs crops ups in ralph ellison’s the invisible man.

fahey (on this occasion) was friendly and helpful (doesn't sullivan realise how rare that was?). fahey identifies the line as  ‘lord, blessed daughter, don’t you be so wild’. fahey is only mentioned in passing, as part of that strange tribe - the white blues aficionados - but sullivan detects, in fahey’s pointing out that early blues singers ‘didn’t care about the words’ and ‘were all illiterate anyway’, a

‘reflexive swerving between ecstatic appreciation and an urge to minimise the aesthetic significance of the country blues’ 

sullivan wants to save the memory of the blues musicians (and their words) from the blues aficionados and collectors - he wants to save them as writers capable of great aesthetic effects achieved by purposeful juxtaposition and conscious understanding of form.

and so (horsemouth thinks) would fahey - but it doesn’t take literacy to be capable of creating (‘writing’) lyrics like these (that is a modern prejudice). blues was often music for dancing played for extended time with improvised lyrics using many ‘floater’ lines from other songs. listen to some son house - you’ll see what horsemouth means, the same backing tracks recycled over and over with new lyrics as the situation demands. musicians going to record would probably pick their best lines but little seems through composed - most of it seems inspired juxtaposition, a skillful arrangement of the lines that worked. and the lines that work are the ones that we remember - and the singers who sing those lines are the ones that we remember. it is not for nothing that musicans call a memorable line (or muscial phrase) a hook.

the hook we hear - it catches us - but the other lines have become indistinct.

there is an analogous argument to the conscious creation argument in sullivan’s pulphead piece about blues musicians learning from records (rather than from direct face to face contact in some imagined ur-folk moment). this happened, the musician’s tell us this in their surviving testimony, but it proves little about the process of creation.

getting recorded was, in any event,a rare event. in attempting to free the bluesmen up from the mystification spread over them by the (predominantly) white collectors sullivan ends up casting that mystification (that ‘blues twilight’) over the music of fahey - instead of robert johnson it is fahey who becomes haunted and hoodooed and damned and ‘irony free’.

horsemouth thinks one can safely say if there was one thing fahey was not it was irony free - all of fahey’s career is a deeply ironic (indeed postiviely sarcastic) attack upon the ethnographer’s interpretation of the blues, the folkies’ version of the blues, an attempt to defend the object itself from its fans. his is a similar mission to sullivan's.

the point of departure for sullivan’s comments on fahey is in fact fahey’s ironising.

fahey infact wants to save the bluesmen as writers capable of great aesthetic effects achieved by purposeful juxtaposition and conscious understanding of form but in terms of the music not so much the lyrics - he has little interest in the lyrics, and has excised them away in his own work in an attempt to reveal what lies beneath.

in this disparagement of the lyric he is like adorno, but like adorno they have a way of sneaking back into his argument.

with sullivan we have a piece that allocates central place to the lyrics that begins with the inaudibility of lyrics. (horsemouth mentions this in passing - it proves nothing).

sullivan searches intending to find dispatches from the other side of america but he is trapped within the machine of writing that is a machine for myth making. all he can do, as can we all, is redistribute the facts and themes and attributions round the point of the indeterminacy.

in all our struggles for truth and clarity we wrestle with ghosts but they will not out of the flesh.

(if you enjoyed this piece horsemouth prattles on in a similar way in his appreciation of the artist steve mcqueen’s film hunger entitled hungy ghost which can be found on the metamute website).