enowning
Monday, January 30, 2006
 
Who was John Fahey? The Village Voice explains:
Coming to prominence in the early '60s, at the dawn of folk's re-emergence and the rise of the hippie counterculture, John Fahey revolutionized steel-string guitar playing by wedding the fingerpicked blues of Mississippi John Hurt to the structuring prin-ciples of classical composers like Sibelius and Brahms to craft something wholly American. Or as a 1959 article (included in the recent Fonotone box set) noted: "[Fahey] never fully grasped the meaning of Heidegger's angst until he heard it expressed in its supreme articulation on a 78 rpm record by Blind Willie Johnson." Ignoring the segregation of high and low culture, Fahey found something endemic to both, creating a body of work that hangs in the halls of American genius somewhere between Coltrane and Whitman.
I expect the Johnson track for was Fahey was "It's Nobody's Fault But Mine", but for me the Heidegger revelation would be "Let Your Lichtung Shine On Me".
 
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