Fahey - John Fahey: Guitar Anthology Songbook

One of the last, great pioneers of guitar exploration, the late John Aloysius Fahey (19392001) was the grandfather of instrumental acoustic fingerstyle guitar. For over four decades, Faheys vast output of raw, imaginative, deeply beautiful, and sometimes bone-chilling guitar compositions have inspired legions of followers, including such disparate artists as Pete Townshend, Leo Kottke, Beck, Thurston Moore, and Jim ORourke, not to mention countless bedroom fingerpickers across the planet.

More than just a self-taught guitarist, Fahey was a musicologist, composer, record collector, writer, independent record label owner, painter, thinker, provocateur, visionary, and iconoclast. These attributes helped inform his unique sound, often infused with a variety of styles reaching far beyond the anchor of the blues he so loved, incorporating folk, classical, avant-garde, psychedelic, rock, jazz, country, bluegrass, world music, and more. John viewed the guitar as an orchestra in itself, regularly employing counterpoint and alternating bass as his main compositional vehicles. Someone later coined Faheys style American Primitive Guitar, reflecting the untrained, exploratory nature of his approach, derived from his study of American roots music.

Eighteen of his works live on in this John Fahey Guitar Anthology , a definitive collection of notefor- note guitar transcriptions presented in both standard notation and tablature, covering his most iconic recordings from the 1960s and 70s. Fahey recorded multiple versions of several early pieces (sometimes three or four, and even with alternate titles), so to avoid confusion, the source album will be noted with each song in this collection, as well as in the following Discography.

Many of this books corresponding recordings can be found on the excellent John Fahey compilation albums released in the 1990s, in particular, The Legend of Blind Joe Death and Death Chants, Breakdowns & Military Waltzes . But to create even further confusion, both of these albums include two versions of most of the songsthe originals and the updated recordings he produced a few years later. In the Discography, these are designated as 1 or 2, respectively, so it is clear which version each transcription is based upon.

Before you begin your guitar adventure, it is helpful to note a few things about Faheys technique. He used a thumbpick and two fingerpicks (on the index and middle fingers), much like a banjo player. Picks are not necessary to learn the songs, but they will help in emulating the Fahey sound, if so desired. Otherwise, fingernails will do just fine. Alternating bass notes played with the thumb are used throughout these pieces, and often repeated with variations. Though Faheys technique was far from traditional, you can generally assign the thumb to the bottom three low strings, and the fingers to the top three high strings. The key to most of Faheys material is learning the pickhand patterns; once you can get them engrained in your fingers, youll be off and pickin.

Death Chants, Breakdowns & Military Waltzes (1996, Takoma compilation album)

• Dance of the Inhabitants of the Palace of King Phillip of Spain
• Some Summer Day (2)
• Spanish Dance (2)
• Sunflower River Blues (2)
• When the Springtime Comes Again (2)