How John Fahey Saved Christmas
As music fans, we are presented with something of a contradiction when it comes to the Christmas season: it’s a lovely time of year, but musically… well, it pretty much sucks. Pardon me for me putting that so bluntly, but the crass commercialization of the holiday, which seems to begin earlier every year thanks to overzealous retailers, comes to a head with Christmas records.
So many Christmas records seem to have been knocked out in a few days, with little care or effort. And why do 99 percent of them sound so forced and treacly, so sentimental – that is, the ones that aren’t blatantly novelty records? (We know the songs aren’t so good to begin with, but they don’t sound that way when we sing them together with our friends and family!) And why are the novelty records themselves so bad? “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer”? My six-year-old nephew knew that wasn’t funny when he was three.
Do you own any Christmas records that you might listen to in, say, April? I do, and they’re all by acoustic guitar innovator John Fahey.
The bearish iconoclast’s work has long been well known to devotees of acoustic guitar music, and in the mid ’90s he was rediscovered by the alt-rock community. Although his work is all instrumental, Fahey’s song titles can be racy and un-PC (i.e. “Revolt of the Dyke Brigade”). (Though Nothing of the sort appears on his album of Christian material Yes! Jesus Loves Me and the strange, beautiful God, Time and Causality). Fahey also compiled a riveting and raw selection of early gospel blues called American Primitive on his own Revenant label in 1991.
In 1964, John Fahey virtually reinvented the acoustic guitar as a solo instrument on his infamous self-released Blind Joe Death LP, which had an enigmatic spare cover that read “Blind Joe Death” on one side and “John Fahey” on the other. That first record, financed by a loan from an Episcopalian priest, is a little bit of a collector’s item – 100 were pressed and several broke in transit so the first pressing ended up being something like 95 copies. Fahey sold the discs – very slowly – from the gas station where he worked; that led to the start of his label Takoma, one of the premier folk indies of the ’60s. Fahey re-visited and re-recorded that Blind Joe Death material twice in the ’60s and once in the ’80s. His music inspired an extremely diverse array of players, among them Leo Kottke, Will Ackerman, Jim O’Rourke, >Robbie Basho, George Winston and Thurston Moore.
His style of playing is a celebration of the instrument, delighting in the resonance of the steel strings against wood. As for Fahey’s own influences, pianist George Winston pegged them pretty well in the notes to The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death (Takoma, 1997): “John was influenced most profoundly by the pre-World War II blues guitarists, especially Charlie Patton, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and Bukka White. His other influences are many, including old-time country, bluegrass, traditional jazz, ragtime, European symphonic works, classical music from India and the work of the late great Brazilian guitarist, Bola Sete.” Throw the sound of the railroad and gamelan music in there, and you’ve got a pretty definitive list.
Clearly an artist unafraid of revisiting the same material, Fahey made a total of four separate recordings of Christmas music between 1968 and ’88. A New Possibility – John Fahey’s Christmas Album Volumes 1 And 2 collects the first two, which conveniently happen to be the best ones. The artist himself was chagrined that these recordings outsold the rest of his catalogue and felt they were filled with errors, but in truth these arrangements are sparse, beautiful and delightfully ponderous.
His version of “The First Noel” is slowed to a crawl so that each finger-picked note hangs in the air like smoke from a candle. “Silent Night” is played with a slightly Delta blues-ish slide guitar twang, while “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” is plucked so forcefully it seems to become a new song entirely. More obscure tunes are given their due, as well, such as “Go I Will Send Thee” and “Lo How a Rose E’er Blooming.” There are long stretches where you’ll simply forget what it is you’re listening to. This is truly the highest praise I can think to give towards recordings of songs you’ve heard thousands of times by now.
