ABSTRACT
Around the time that the Anthology of Amer ican Folk Music was being rediscovered by a new generation of listeners, thanks to the 1997 Smithsonian Folkways reissue, the career of one of the Anthology’s early enthusiasts, the Amer ican guitarist John Fahey (1939-2001), was also experiencing something of a rebirth after two decades of neglect. Fahey had risen to prominence in the 1960s for his inventive acoustic steel-string compositions that fused blues, folk, bluegrass, jazz, and ragtime with symphonic, classical, and world musics. “I was listening to a lot of Bartók and Shostakovich and bluegrass,” Fahey tells Jason Gross in a late interview: “Harry Smith stuff and other similar records. I tried to syncretize all that in one guitar style and I think I succeeded pretty well.”1 What Fahey achieved was, to quote from the notes to his 1968 record The Voice of the Turtle, a syncretiszation of “volk roots and hiart.”2 Amalgamating vernacular, classical, and symphonic influences, and tempering them considerably with his own maverick tunings and playing style, Fahey “made an orchestra out of the guitar.”3 As Barry Hansen notes, Fahey, was
the first to demonstrate that finger-picking techniques of traditional country and blues steel-string guitar could be used to express a world of non-traditional musical ideas-harmonies and melodies you’d associate with Bartók, Charles Ives, or maybe the music of India.4
