john fahey week 2021 - day 7 - final day - robbie basho day

today is the anniversary of the birth of john fahey and the death of robbie basho. fahey week 2021 comes to an end. 

while fahey repudiated cosmic sentimentalism basho did not. his work represents a sustained attempt to reach spiritual take-off from the homeland of california. 

'another guy called reuben lacey... he played with a medicine bottle'

so says son house at a gig in oberlin college April 15, 1965 (at about 4.00 minutes in). son house began as a preacher and become a blues singer, reuben lacey went at it the other way. in the 30ies he recorded sides for paramount in the 60ies he was conducting a church in ridgecrest california. 

 

 

here a blues fan the fake luthier goes in search of him. 

like son house reuben was rediscovered in the  60ies by fahey, david evans and al 'blind owl' wilson. there was an album of his church music (sounding like blind willie johnson) put out on takoma. 

today fahey week 2021 ends. soon jackson c. frank is born (and dies the very next day). then it is bandcamp friday and then (soon enough) the equinox. 

reuben may have sung this hymn (by brother claude ely).

'there ain't no grave can hold my body down

there ain't no grave can hold my body down

when I hear that trumpet sound

I'm gonna rise right out of the ground

ain't no grave can hold my body down...'

'misty blue and lilac too. never to grow old'

horsemouth is getting old and clunky. after developing arthritis in the little finger of his right hand (a finger he fortunately never uses for picking), he is now developing arthritis in the little finger of his left hand (one he unfortunately does use for fretting).

he has arthritis in the other joints of both hands of course (but he isn't feeling them yet). 

there are (of course) plenty of older guitarists in the world who have faced these problems before. being less able to play with the little finger is a major loss in the classical repertoire in other repertoires it can be routed around by moving the hand. django reinhardt developed a whole technique around only having two fingers on the left hand (and guess what? it involved moving the hand).

come to it horsemouth can play a decent impersonation of most of his fingerpicking stuff just with thumb and forefinger.

there's always slide horsemouth observes (or cheating as the reverend gary davis would call it). 

music (horsemouth opines) is mainly in the ears and the brain. 

when fahey grew old he took up electric guitar (he clearly still had strong fingers because he's bending strings all over the shop). with fahey it's not so much speed and accuracy as patience and digging deep (you want speed and accuracy check out leo kottke). it's listening and framing that makes what fahey does great.

‘if the thought really yielded to the object, if its attention were on the object, not on its category, the very objects would start talking under the lingering eye’. 

remarks adorno at some point in negative dialectics.

outside it is misty. horsemouth will be out for a wander after breakfast. 

john fahey week 2021 day 5 - morning moods

so fahey lifted this for one of his songs.

horsemouth is hiding from the virus with a tinfoil hat on (day)/ paper bag over his head (night). he will be back when he can get back or to get his jab or when he needs to for work. tbh there's not anything more he can do in london under lockdown than he can do here (work online, fart about on the internet, watch telly). it's good to keep his folks company and they are in the middle of the countryside so it's fairly easy social distancing.

he chatted to sten on the phone. he did a co-op meeting. he got ian to take a meter reading. it's been a cold winter, gas consumption is up, with a bit of luck the rest of it will be mild and it will all balance out. 

that said he has met and talked to two people up on the common. (this is not ideal horsemouth should be living in splendid isolation he doesn't want to risk bringing the virus back to his parents   (even though they've had the first jab). 

horsemouth has a cold. (blocked nostril sometime sore throat). 

today is a beautiful spring morning - the celandine is up (ficaria verna). there was a frost  and there's mist. it looks like some olafur eliasson exhibit. horsemouth awaits breakfast (see how they are spoiling him) and then he will go for a walk. 

in the afternoon he will work (and then that's him for the week). next week he expects to be much the same. there's a chance the students will start having face to face labs after march the 8th (but horsemouth thinks it is already too late in the academic year and they have only a few weeks left of teaching to go anyway). 

if so horsemouth will have an excuse to return to the seaside towns (otherwise he's going to have to wing it). 

last night he watched lady snowblood to go with il grande silenzio another snow set revenger (he wonders if he can find mccabe and miss miller anywhere). 

fahey week 2021 day 4 - on doing an evil deed blues

horsemouth is up. he has his coffee. he works later. 

the primroses are coming through on the banking. the snowdrops are up. the daffodils are on their way up. the bluebells too (apparently). 

last night he 'went' to a meeting of the communal endeavour. horsemouth mainly goes to prevent anything stupid from being done or wreckers from rolling sisyphus's rock back down the hill when he isn't looking. it went well. (well as well as can be expected).

once again somebody wants to stop development because the future of capitalism (and thus the london rental market) is unclear (post covid). they worry that the value of the property will go down (it may well do) but this doesn't matter because the purpose of the co-op is to house its members (not to own a valuable portfolio of desirable properties). 

times remain far from ideal. horsemouth opines that 'to live well is the best revenge'. it really is a very pretty morning out. horsemouth should get out and enjoy it.

it's fahey week 2021 day 4. horsemouth is showing you a recording of john fahey made at dick spottswood's home in the westmoreland hills, maryland, early 1959. from the time before fahey had an 'act' (as andrew minty would term it). 

fahey week 2021 day 3 - the teachings of blind joe death

 it is in the sonoran desert that our tale begins, where the dasein and the tonal howl at night, where the locals smoke mushrooms  and the mountain lions attack. there anthropology student  john fahey travelled in search of legendary bluesman blind joe death (though the precise dates of his fieldwork are not clear and even contradictory). 

fahey found death.

he found blind joe death using the seven degrees of separation. by sending a letter addressed ' Joe Death. a black man of about 60, a blind man, blues musician and shaman, somewhere near the sonoran desert.' 

fahey, basho and the filmcrew found him working as a gravedigger in a three casa village. 'what kept ya?'  said the sage. in the local cantina, over the many glasses of rotgut whiskey necessary to build rapport with the source, senjor joe explained that what one needed to be was not a guitarist and an entertainer (or a cited anthropologist) but a man of power who did not care what others thought of him, who could retire to the desert and live in poverty and anonymity without a second thought. 

'I have seen amazing things.' said the sage. 

'silver ravens on fire on the belt of orion'

'moonbeams glittering on sacred mushrooms'

'the light of a flashlight reflected on the back of a deer's eyeballs at night.'

'harry everett smith sitting in the jail of a hick town...' 

'let's not talk about harry.' said the young anthropology student quickly, 'tell me about the blues. is it similar to the tonal. or the dasein.' 

'all of these are just words. like the words of a field report or a best selling novel. what you need young man is actual phenomenological experience that can be related to the categories of structuralist theory preferably by naive uneducated native informants...'

the young anthropologist threw down his pen. for he had been making notes in his notebook (even though it made his informant nervous). 

'goddammit I told you not to mention the structuralists, they're out of fashion'

'sorry. sorry.' the old man looked genuinely upset behind his dark glasses.

' how about an ethnomethodological breaching of the accepted definition of reality. a break in theory rather and a break in practice...' 

robbie basho was clearly unused to the drinking he sat slumped in a corner singing to himself. when they came to clean up in the morning they would find him wide eyed with terror, clutching  a crucifix and muttering about the old gods.

'let's go.' said fahey. jumping up and grabbing his guitar case. 

'where'

'the crossroads'

'not that old shit again. I told you before. all of that is bullshit lifted from english romantic poets. " mad, bad and dangerous to know". you'd think white people would recognise it...'

'cummon... get up... there's another bottle of whiskey in it for you.'

at the crossroads the wind howled like the hound of the baskervilles.

fahey got out his guitar tuned it to a gaped myxolydian and started to sing.

'jesus. that was fucking terrible. don't do that ever again.' admonished the sage. 

fahey week 2021 day 2 - the great american primitive swindle

‘an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, ingenuity, skill, and often of money’

 - les jeux et les hommes, roger caillois

such is play (according to roger caillois) and indeed such is much of playing music. comparatively little of it is work (paid employment) and comparatively little of it is economically viable in terms of reproducing the labour value of the player (certainly over the extended periods of time we refer to as a 'career'). 

except for busking (which perhaps explains its lowly status).  

of course with gambling play can become positively harmful. people wish to demonstrate that they are not controlled by money, to demonstrate their autonomy, by betting the farm (so clifford geertz argues in deep play: notes on the balinese cockfight). there can be no rational theory of economic gain to support their decision, just a desire to feel alive. 

the young fahey records his first album (blind joe death) himself and gets 100 copies pressed up (he is supported in this by his earnings from a job as a petrol pump attendant in takoma park and some money from the local episcopalian priest). some of these he sells but mostly he gives them away or hides them in thrift stores. 

already it resembles an art project more than a slick commercial operation.

but already this history hides his juvenalia - the recordings he'd made for joe bussard (as blind thomas for example).  

the second album is different. the second album benefits from playing live in folk clubs over on the west coast and from his studies leading to his  MA in folklore from UCLA. another graduate of the anthropology department there was notorious faker carlos castaneda. 

there is something to be written in the parallels between their lives. 

he has ED denson taking care of business. it's the one where he gets some sense of his worth both as a musician and as a writer with the sleevenotes.  the site of the game is now takoma records. 

'he lived like a vagrant' (fahey week 2021 begins)

ladies and gentlemen it is fahey week once again.

fahey week 2021 commences. 

february 22nd the anniversary of his death  to february 28 the anniversary of his birth

horsemouth begins by comparing john fahey and that other curmudgeon harry everett smith. 

harry everett smith was a collector. people have heard the anthology of american folk music but have not seen his other collections, listened to his other recordings or watched his movies. 

One of his obsessions was paper aeroplanes, which he mostly found on New York’s streets between 1961 and 1983.

'in retrospect, it's clear that he was a major figure, but in his lifetime he lived like a vagrant.' 

so says andrew lampert, one of the compilers of the book. 

and this is the problem. people cannot understand that both fahey and harry smith did not have successful careers that would lead to a nice house in the suburbs and tenure and yet at the same time they were significant. it makes them nervous, it's as if the object of their attentions wasn't worthy.

fahey's fans have this, playing fingerstyle guitar (being a real musician who can actually play) seems so virtuous and blameless that it is difficult to believe it led him to alcoholism, prescription medicine abuse, life in welfare hotels and obesity (and yet it is so). 

both fahey and harry smith were anthropologists turned tricksters. survival and the continued production of art required some fairly nefarious and reprehensible ducking and diving. 

both had a vexed relationship with the folk establishment. with the 'political' model of how folk music was said to cause change, both looked back (via the lens of record collecting) to a kind of american music that was gone and sought not merely to replay it but to create something new with it.

on 20th february 1991 (30 years ago the day before yesterday) harry smith received the chairman's merit award from the national academy of recording arts and sciences (the final award and completely misrepresented his work by the way).  'he saw america changed through music.' 

dylan is another one (who takes the material and makes something new with it). probably henry flynt also. 

over the week horsemouth will endeavour to lay out more material by fahey.