The Best of John Fahey, 1959-1977

There are always musicians that we hear about as worth discovering but that step isn't taken for whatever reasons, often because there are others being followed or because there is only so much time or, more likely, money to spend on this habit/passion.  It may also be that some of these performers are in genres (generally defined arbitrarily) that are unfamiliar or that might be though alien to current tastes.  But, as we evolve, the opportunities may arise for reconsideration or reorientation and those names, brought up long ago, recur and the thought is that maybe it's long past time to give them a listen.

This was certainly the case recently with John Fahey.  It may have been reading an interview with another musician, say, Jimmy Page, or a long-ago album or concert review.  Whatever the dimly recalled source, it was remembered that Fahey was considered an incredible guitarist and composer who never sold a great many records, but was highly respected by fellow musicians.  So, at long last, The Best of John Fahey, 1959-1977, was purchased and, as is so often the case, this led to the question, "why did this take so long?"

The album was released in 1977 on Fahey's Takoma label (named for his Maryland hometown) with 15 tracks selected by him as best representative of his nearly two-decade recording career, though this 2002 CD reissue added two long pieces and a shorter blues, to fill out to the near maximum of the medium.  What a powerful and incredibly entertaining experience this has been and listened to many times since its acquisition.

With "Sunflower River Blues," one can easily hear why Page was so taken by Fahey's mastery (it is obvious in the Led Zeppelin guitarist's acoustic pieces like "Bron-Yr-Aur" from Physical Graffiti, for example).  Moreover, another great guitar player and songwriter who was finally listened to at this time, Leo Kottke, was given his first recording opportunity by Fahey and the kinship obviously shows.  Another like example is John Prine.  This album is full of amazing recordings, so that there really aren't any highlights, just a consistently brilliant set of tunes, all beautifully played, complex and immersive as Fahey called his approach "Bartok with syncopation."

This listener did find the longer-form pieces particularly striking, these being "America" and "Fare Forward Voyages," but the truth is that this nearly 80-minute recording goes by so quickly that picking favorites is just not feasible.  While Fahey long dealt with alcoholism, financial problems, divorces and worsening health in his later years, there was a resurgence near the end of his life as his music was reappraised by so many other musicians.  In the late 90s, he co-founded Revenant Records which issued many remarkable recordings including Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come, Cecil Taylor's famous 1962 Copenhagen concert and the astounding box set, Holy Ghost, of Albert Ayler's music, both of which have been featured here.

It may have taken far too long to get to the point of finally hearing John Fahey's music, but what a revelation this anthology has been and it inspired the belated discovery of Kottke and Prine, both of whom will be highlighted in future posts here.

Joni Mitchell: Court and Spark

Why it took this long to get to listening to Joni Mitchell is an interesting question because she's certainly been someone who's been on the radar for a long time—the same could be said for Neil Young or Brian Eno, the Rolling Stones and others who've finally been on the playlist lately.  For many people, the obvious place to start is Blue, Mitchell's phenomenal 1971 album that has bene heard as part of this discovery and will certainly get its due.

Court and Spark, however, from a few years later is where we'll start, not because it's considered better, but it's where this belated appreciation began.  With appearances from stellar musicians as Tom Scott, Joe Sample, Larry Carlton, José Feliciano, Robbie Robertson, David Crosby and Graham Nash, among others, as well as comedic cameo from Cheech and Chong, Mitchell's complex and incisive songwriting and gorgeous singing are given ample support.

Moreover, this is a notable level of diversity in the tunes in terms of tempo, instrumentation, harmonics and other factors that make the album truly stand out.  As great as "Help Me," which remains her biggest hit is, there really are so many great songs on Court and Speak that it is hard to pick out some more than others.  The title track, "Free Man in Paris," "Down To You," "People's Parties," and "The Same Situation" stand out in this listener's mind, but it's actually what Mitchell does throughout the album that makes the biggest impact.

This means the multi-tracking of her vocals which, as a fan of Cocteau Twins since 1986, this blogger immediately recognized as major influences on that group's Elizabeth Fraser and her vocalizations.  The intricate and innovative melodies and the style of Mitchell's singing are also obvious focal points, as are her amazing lyrical abilities, which find some humorous expression in "Raised on Robbery," while her cover of "Twisted," with its trenchant lyrics by Annie Ross and set to a solo by the great tenor sax player, Wardell Gray, is an entertaining way to complete a stunning album.

Having started with Court and Spark, it was easy to move to Blue and then to follow that with other Mitchell albums, though, again, why it took so long to finally get here is more than puzzling.

Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited

Before the film, A Complete Unknown, was known to this blogger, an interest in revisiting the music of Bob Dylan surfaced last year after close to four decades of not hearing much of his remarkable work.  After acquiring John Wesley Harding, which had not been heard before, a spate of other albums were purchased, including such classics as Blood on the Tracks, Bringing It All Back Home, Blonde on Blonde and, more recently, Before the Flood, the great live album with The Band.

A favorite of the Dylan recordings that have been rediscovered is Highway 61 Revisited, released at the end of August 1965 (when this blogger was a day shy of two months old) and appearing just four months after Bringing It All Back Home.  It's hard to argue that, with Blonde on Blonde being 22 months away, Dylan was at his creative zenith, churning out amazing songs with startling frequency on albums that redefined much of popular music.

Obviously, his move from acoustic folk to electric rock was controversial to the ardent fans of the former —and the fourth volume of the Bootleg Series comprising two discs of the notorious Royal Albert Hall concert in London in May 1966 during which an outraged Luddite yelled "Judas," to which Dylan sardonically replied, "I don't believe you"—is a fantastic document of that move.

Highway 61 Revisited is a staggering record from the opening "Like A Rolling Stone" to the rollicking "Tombstone Blues" to the "Ballad of a Thin Man" and ending with the epic "Desolation Row."  With musicians like Mike Bloomfield and his impressive guitar work and Al Kooper's iconic organ on that first tune and elsewhere, not to mention Bobby Gregg's drums and Charley McCoy's guitar, accompanying Dylan's impressionistic and immersive lyrics, the album is a masterpiece from start to finish.  

Listeners expecting to get some enlightenment from Dylan's liner notes can be amused by the wordplay and seemingly stream of consciousness expressions including his remark that "the songs on this specific record are not so much songs but rather exercises in tonal breath control" while the lyrics about "beautiful strangers, Vivaldi's green jacket & the holy slow train."  Dylan often commented that the content meant various things to different people and it may be better to enjoy his way with language and the performances of the musicians rather than to try and interpret the so-called "voice of his generation."

Elizabeth Cotten: Freight Train and Other North Carolina Folk Songs and Tunes

The name Elizabeth Cotten first came to this blogger's attention on the 1987 Firehose album If'n and its fine ballad "In Memory of Elizabeth Cotten," written and performed by the band's guitarist and singer Ed Crawford.

Years later, a couple of her albums were acquired and this Smithsonian Folkways release is the first part of an amazing story.  Cotten, who was born in 1895 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, learned to play guitar upside down in her distinctive finger-picking style as a young girl, married, raised a family, divorced and was working in a department store in Washington, D.C. when she returned a lost child to her family.

It turned out the child was Peggy Seeger of the well-known musical family, including her older half-brother Pete, the famed folk singer, and her brother Mike, compiler of this recording.  Hired to work for the Seeger family, Cotten saw a guitar on the wall of the home, stated that she used to play and "started playing again, recalling one by one many of the songs and tunes of her childhood and youth."

That led to her being recorded by Mike Seeger in 1957 and 1958 with the result being this album with the very long title, but a great many attractions.  The main one is that Cotten was remarkably dexterous and played the guitar and banjo with great senstitvity and skill.  Another is that her fragile voice rings with authenciity and the weight of experience for someone in her early sixties who'd raised a family and worked for decades.  Finally, the material is beautiful, constituting the marriage of folk and blues that made so much of the folk revival of the time so interesting.

Cotten's "Freight Train," which she wrote in her pre-teen years, became well-known, but there are other excellent songs, like "Oh, Babe, It Ain't No Lie," "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad," and a trio of medleys.  It's stated that she recorded many of the pieces on this phenomenal record at her home, while her grandchildren silently watched and listened.  This makes this one of the more interesting "live albums" you could imagine from a musician of immense talent and charm!

Masters of Old-Time Country Autoharp

Somtimes a recording is (or a group of them are) acquired out of sheer curiosity and this great Smithsonian Folkways release is one of those.  An expanded version of a 1962 Folkways album, this disc features nearly forty short pieces played on the autoharp, an instruments invented in the 1870s as a variation of a zither. 

Several posts on this blog, mainly of music from other countries, have highlighted instruments that are related to the zither and dulcimer, most recently the post on Lily Yuan, a Chinese master of her instrument.  Here is an album focusing on performers in the Appalachian region of the southern U.S. performing on the autoharp, which reached this area as the 19th century yielded to the 20th.

The players are Ernest "Pop" Stoneman, the first person to record on the instrument back in 1924; Kilby Snow, who held the instrument upright and played what he called "drag notes," or slurs or hammering on the strings across frets; and the father-and-son duo of Neriah and Kenneth Benfield, who played duets and solo pieces on the recording.  All four men are masters, though Snow is particularly impressive for his innovative technique.  There is accompaniment on harmonica (Stoneman), guitar, and banjo, as well.

Spearheading the recording was Mike Seeger, who came from a prominent musical family that included his half-brother Pete Seeger of the famed folk group The Weavers, and who was founder of the New Lost City Ramblers during the Folk Revival of the late 1950s.  Seeger's notes are very interesting and informative as he detailed the use of the autoharp and discussed the musicians, with whom he accompanied on several tracks.  Song notes of tunes that are both traditional pieces and originals by the musicians are also notable and are by Charles Wolfe.

The sounds generated by the autoharp are clear, ringing and, to this listeners, inherently uplifting.  The problem was that the instrument needed frequent tuning, which led people to abandon it when the fad wore off and it was easier to turn to other instruments, such as banjo or guitar.  More modern versions, from the 1960s onward, were improved to avoid the need for frequent retuning.  Masters of Old-Time Country Autoharp is an excellent introduction to the instrument and the Southern tradition of playing it, even for those who might not think country, folk or bluegrass is of interest.

Dave Van Ronk: The Folkways Years, 1959-1961

This amazing album documents a short period of time, 1959 to 1961, when Dave Van Ronk recorded for Moses Asch's Folkways label, and there's a great deal of remarkable guitar playing and singing by a man who insisted he was not a folk singer, but a jazz singer.

Undoubtedly, Van Ronk was heavily indebted to black musicians, including blues, jazz and gospel artists including Jelly Roll Morton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Bessie Smith, and the Reverend Gary Davis, and it is great to have his recollections about those years generally and the songs on the record specifically.  He writes with great humor and irony, as well as affection for his influences and confederates.

He also was quite honest, noting that, with "River, She Come Down," the tune was "the only song I ever wrote that made me any money, and I hate it."  He considered the piece "as a guitar exercise" with lyrics consisting of "nonsensical doggerel."  But when Peter, Paul and Mary covered the tune, renamed "Bamboo," for their debut album, it "sold seven trillion copies."  Still, Van Ronk concluded, "I shared the royalties (and the chagrin)" with Dick Weissman, who came up with the chorus.

While Van Ronk also offered that he should have waited a year or two before recording the pieces and thought of the work "as a journeyman's progress report" who "starting to get the hang of it," the album is filled with some excellent fret work, distinctive singing, and potent mixtures of humor and activism.  It wasn't more than a few years before folk was passed by in favor of rock (note Van Ronk's friend Bob Dylan's decision to go electric in 1965) and Van Ronk became something of a forgotten figure, though he remained active until his death in 2002 at age 65.

This album, though, is a potent reminder of what an immensely talented musician Dave Van Ronk was and it's great that the Smithsonian put this together after its absorption of the Folkways inventory.

Joseph Spence: The Complete Folkways Recordings, 1958

The liner notes description by Samuel Charters, who recorded this music while in search of traditional folk music in the Bahamas in 1958, tells it all.  He and a colleague were on the sparsely-populated island of Andros, which had fewer than 900 residents, and he continued:

We went out one day about noon  . . . some men were working on the foundation of a new house, and as we came close to them we could hear guitar music.  It was some of the most exuberant, spontaneous, and uninhibited guitar playing we had ever heard, but all we could see was a man in a faded short and rumpled khaki trousers sitting on a pile of bricks.  He had a large acoustic guitar in his lap.  I wsa so sure two guitarists were playing that I went along the path to look on the other side of the wall to see where the other musician was sitting.  I had just met Joseph Spence.

Charters went on to note that

his playing was stunning.  He was playing simple popular melodies and using them as the basis for extended rhythmic and melodic variations.  He often seemed to be improvising in the bass, the middle strings and the treble at the same time.  Sometimes a variation would strike the men [working on the house] and Spence himself as so exciting that he would simply stop playing and join thyem in the shouts of excitement,

The unheralded guitarist then walked over to the house where Charters and his future wife Ann Danberg were staying and was followed by quite a crowd.  Unable to squeeze everyone into the small dwelling, Charters decided to do "the recording on the porch."  He then reeled off enough material for an album and a half, combined into one disc here, for the Folkways label, now Smithsonian Folkways.

After Spence "played as much as he wanted we paid him the little money we had" and then the musician headed off for animated games of Bahamian checkers until his friends finished their construction work.

Charters talked about attempts to get Spence more attention during the "new folk" scene in New York, but there were other musicians who were more popular and one visit in which the Bahamian guitarist was accompanied by religious family members led to a much tempered sound when he played.

These recordings are remarkable in that a guitarist with such stunning command of his instrument and with the inventiveness and creativity of a master improviser was found by happenstance.  Spence accompanied himself with a steady tapping of a foot to keep the rhythm rock solid and growled lyrics and hummed to keep in place with the song.   But, it's those variations and his use of all the strings of his instrument that make these recordings so amazing.