Over the last few months, I ran a series of listening parties where we followed American musical history from the 1920s through the Folk Revival. As we moved into the 1960s, I found myself thinking about the musical work of John Fahey, in particular his 1965 album The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death, which I observed might be difficult for listeners to grasp. The album itself is pleasant on its own, but I realized I would have to explain at some length what Fahey was trying to do in order to make sense of why the album isn’t just a nice work of folk guitar, but an avant-garde critique of the Folk Revival movement. This post is my attempt at that explanation, so you too can better situate and understand his work.

In a previous post, I discussed modernist tendencies in Roguelike video games, with an eye toward how they condensed the games’ essential qualities and streamlined the form over time. An excellent comment on that post gave me enough historical context to clarify a core distinction that I glossed in the piece: the modernist tendency of distillation I was analyzing had more to do with drawing out a new way of understanding the meaning of the work, rather than making a claim about the original intentions or reception of the work. In other words, the modernist compressive tendency is about taking a different and new view on what is “essential” to a work, and eliminating what was once important but now inessential.

When contemplating Fahey’s work1, I realized a similar distinction applied to his music as to the Roguelikes I was looking at in the prior essay: Fahey’s Transfiguration distills the Folk Revival into its uncanny essence, much as bebop did to swing, revealing both the apex and exhaustion of the movement. He called this project American Primitivism.

Put differently, Fahey’s work reveals directly in music what the Folk Revival was trying to do, through an act of reduction, an elimination of non-essential elements. The Folk Revival’s orientation toward music, finding its distinct perspective through curating a corpus of defamiliarized recordings, marks the beginning of our modern understanding of music, so studying Fahey’s work can help us understand other discursive shifts that took place in popular music over the last 80 years.

1. A Very Brief History of the Folk Revival

To start small: what does The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death even mean? Blind Joe Death was Fahey’s pseudonym, a revived bluesman who never was, invented as part of Fahey’s first album, Blind Joe Death, in 1959. 1965 is the year of his transfiguration: Jesus’ transfiguration was “the greatest miracle” where perfection was revealed. So too with Blind Joe. But where did this transfiguration come from? What exactly is being perfected?

To understand, we need some historical context. Rewind. Electrical recording arrives in 1925 and records start sounding halfway decent. A recording frenzy kicks off. Bluesmen and old guys on porches make it onto wax for the first time as labels seek to capitalize. Then the depression hits and the more niche, regional music gets cut. Lomax Jr. and Sr. take for the hill country and west to track down whatever remains. Woody Guthrie passes his torch to Pete Seeger, upgrading “This Machine Kills Fascists” to “This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It To Surrender”. Soon after, McCarthy declares Seeger a communist and forces him to surrender, by putting his group, The Weavers, on a federal blacklist.

It’s the mid 1950s. A bunch of West Village NEETs Beats go to the library and discover, much to their surprise, that folk music from 30 years ago is, like, really aesthetic and authentic. So they start playing it themselves. They also head for the woods to seek out O.G.s and put them on record again. Folk is back, from the grave. It’s the Folk Revival. Featuring luminaries like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and… Pete Seeger. And his half-brother Mike Seeger who’s way cooler, trust me. Meme trickle-down occurs as usual from the NYC culturati to college kids, and the College Folk Revival is also born, itself the grist that became Sunshine Pop, calling card of the much derided hippies. To understand why this all happened, we need to understand the changing nature of musical curation.

2. Curation as Creation of a New Aesthetic

Musical curation didn’t begin in the 1950s, but during that period, the nature of curation changed and came into its own as a distinct form. The 1950s was the first time in the history of recorded music where young people could hear high fidelity recordings from before they were born. This distance allows listeners to re-evaluate the nature of the music, which is both familiar—maybe half-recalled from childhood—and foreign, coming from a place and time outside of one’s own experience.

Further, the presence of a corpus of high fidelity recordings, in this case from the 1920s, changes the nature of a curatorial approach. These new listeners can use curation to draw out something new from the music through their careful selection. Curation ceases to be about a night’s “programme” at the symphony and instead takes on a more involved and central role in the course of cultural and aesthetics discourse. Music as recorded medium finally becomes suitable for “gallery-style” curation as an act of creation, like a primitive version of the modern DJ set.

The Folk Revival followed Eno’s oft-cited rule about deficiencies becoming definitions: “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.” The crackle and distance of 20s and 30s era recordings surely struck 50s kids as something inspiring and weird. Although the old blues in particular always had a funerary or spectral element intrinsic to it, just listen to the third disc of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, or Robert Johnson. You as modern listener with this lineage baked into your historical unconscious (assuming you grew up on “dad rock” like most Americans) may be able to access a similar experience as the revivalists themselves: a sense of eerieness, strangeness, of “coming back from the depths of time.”

So the Folk Revival pulled on this ghostly string. Both the “straight” re-enactment groups like The New Lost City Ramblers and young folkies like Bob Dylan2 worked with this aesthetic material. John Fahey called himself “Blind Joe Death”, like Blind Lemon Jefferson or Blind Blake, both very much already dead. Looking more closely at Fahey’s actual music, what he’s trying to do in response to both the original folk music and the revivalism going on around him, we can come to see how this essential quality newly understood by the Folk Revival is the precise thing he’s trying to capture.

3. The Essence of Fahey’s Project

I wrote in an earlier post that Fahey’s music is “a condensation of history into an absolutely minimal form”. What does this mean? For one, all his recordings are solo guitar. Just him alone on guitar, no singing. While it’s not historically unusual for folk records to be solo performances, instrumental solo folk recordings were fairly uncommon, with only a few present on Harry Smith’s Anthology.

What he does with his solo guitar is, one track at a time, deconstruct American traditional folk music. He singles out riffs that seem to most closely stylize American folk and blues from the 20s, and repeats them until they lose musical meaning, or else he breaks a lick down to its essential components until it loses its sense. Keyword: seem, as he’s looking from his vantage point in the 1960s, not from an attempt to understand how the original musicians would’ve heard it.

For example, consider the bottleneck playing on “I Am The Resurrection”. Fahey chooses to emphasize the warbling clickiness of the fingerpicking itself, repeating a barren bass slide, until the pace picks up arrhythmically, shambling forward. From a certain perspective, this is the detritus of folk blues bottleneck playing: the essential qualities of the traditional sound—soulful vocals and performative emotivity—be damned, all that remains is signifier. Fahey’s touches transmit the weird aesthetic that he and his contemporaries heard in the original records in a purified and oddly beautiful form, stripped of any “she left me” rhymes and breathless slide work.

You can go through each track on the album and play a similar game, although it’s not always so obvious. For example: “Brenda’s Blues” plays it straight with a Blind Blake fingerpicking style instead of slide, and amps the already repetitive ragtime style up one more notch, drawing out its specifically hypnotic character as it repeats and repeats beyond when you’d expect a change to occur.

“Old Southern Medley” goes through a version of Camptown Races and ends it just… wrong, exactly where you wouldn’t expect. It touches on the familiar resolution at the I and then immediately hangs onto the II chord, lingering with a sense of anticipation rather than giving the familiar closure3. This anticipatory flourish is another example of how Fahey draws out a ghostly quality from these old songs, above and beyond the feeling they already give of having returned from the grave.

One track stands out from the others: “On The Sunny Side of the Ocean”. It’s far more harmonically experimental, playing with simple open chords that bring out internal dissonances, before moving into a Middle-Eastern-inflected/modal section. This emphasis echoes another recently released album on his label, Takoma: a collection of “country ragas”, Robbie Basho’s Seal of the Blue Lotus. The Eastern influence puts Fahey thematically in close quarters with Davy Graham, who at the same time was traveling around the Middle East adapting their music to fit with a blues and jazz style.

The significance of “On the Sunny Side…” is that it demonstrates the divide between the forward and backward looking qualities of Fahey’s work, while still drawing from the aesthetic discourse of his time. In looking to Indian classical and Middle Eastern music, Fahey is incorporating similar novel stylistic elements as his musical contemporaries, like Davy Graham, which position him at the beginning of what would follow: psychedelia, and the broad integration of Eastern music that would take place in the late 1960s, in particular with groups like The Butterfield Blues Band and The Incredible String Band.

In other words, Fahey’s engagement with Eastern music serves to emphasize my claim that he’s engaging on an essential level with the specific interests of the Folk Revival itself, and not just taking a stance on their 1920s source material. It’s notable that, like Graham, Fahey works through Eastern music in the formal style of the Folk Revival, by taking advantage of their musicological elements on acoustic guitar, as opposed to the shallow but spectacular means like sitar parts or chants that bands like the Beatles and The Yardbirds used.

4. Deconstruction and Levity as Camp

As I claimed above, what Fahey and traditionalists like Mike Seeger were reacting to was the bland political syncretism of Pete Seeger and The Weavers, but Fahey was also reacting against the traditionalists (and “folk-rock” fusion groups), through essentializing and elaborating on how they themselves made sense of the old records.

Fahey’s closest contemporary parallel may have been the Holy Modal Rounders, who attempted to draw out the absurdity and silliness of traditional folk music, making the songs even more lighthearted, as opposed to how Fahey draws out their odd and serious quality. And yet, in drawing out the seriousness, Fahey’s music can come across as playful in a more subtle, muted way than the outrageous ramblings of the Rounders. And the Rounders have a serious side that reveals a sincere appreciation for the music they appear to be parodying: their level of parodic intensity is only possible from a place of deep understanding.

Fahey himself took a lighthearted stance toward his own music at times, leaving in little “goofy” touches like a dog barking false start. This attitude of seriousness in parallel with levity was not so different from the 1920s bluesmen themselves, who were well aware of their status as performers and often approached their music with a similar lightness despite its grave aesthetics.

This entanglement of intensity and lightness was well described by Susan Sontag in 1964, just before the release of Transfiguration, as camp: “the love of the exaggerated… Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much’”. I don’t consider it a reach to claim that both Fahey and the Holy Modal Rounders, each in their respective modes of “stretching the music until it snaps,” can be rightly described as camp.

5. Compression as Discursive Act

The invention of bebop in jazz parallels the goals of Fahey’s work and can reveal the significance of this overall tendency toward distillation. Unlike folk music in the 1930s, jazz was highly commercial and focused on the big band, fueling Adorno’s provocative essay on the topic. Jazz’s miniaturization into bebop had a specific forcing function: the musician’s strike of 1942-44, which accelerated the shift toward small-group formats, especially in commercial recording. Listening to early Charlie Parker is enlightening on this topic, as he takes on each of the distinct roles in a swing orchestra through his intense performances.

While folk music never went through such a bottleneck, the same principle of compression, facilitated by external factors in bebop, emerged in Fahey’s work from his intellectual and aesthetic stances. In both cases, historical sensitivity and deconstruction couple with virtuosity to make a unique statement that can come across as incomprehensible at first blush. And, of course, both were culturally entangled with the 1950s-era NYC hipsters. More broadly, both express the modernist tendency toward reduction and distillation, bebop in particular often drawing from the corresponding visual arts movements, like cubism, when selecting album art.

In a certain sense, once the conditions are in place for the distillation of an entire discourse into a single record, it means the features of the discourse have already crystallized and are no longer stakes in the discursive game: by that point, new recordings can no longer compete to define what the movement or discourse means, it’s already over, exhausted. And it’s at that point in time where the distillation or reduction can occur, which has the potential to kick off an entirely new discourse made up of different components, like bebop did.4

6. So… What Next?

John Fahey, in his “transfiguration” of the Folk Revival through a modernist lens, both represents the movement’s apex and its inevitable end. But Fahey’s project didn’t quite lend itself to an explosive new discourse as bebop did. The form itself, solo acoustic guitar, is a limitation on its own. But the bigger limitation is how Fahey’s music is situated on the edge of the unconscious, playing with one’s half-conscious remembrance of musical history.

From such a state, the only clear next step would be a kind of involution, the self-cannibalization that marks “free music” from Ornette Coleman on, inscribing the unconscious directly on record, as inaccessible on the outside as it is on the inside. Taking this step, Fahey’s 1967 album Requia drew critique for its shift to musique concrète, experimental tape collage. Structurally speaking, Fahey’s move to tape collage reintegrates his music back into the broader approach of the avant-garde of his time, losing the specific qualities of Folk Revival transfiguration that makes Transfiguration so special.

Luckily for us, The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death is a fun listen even without observing the discursive games he’s playing. You can throw it on in the background, no need to close listen. But I hope this essay gives some motivation to give him your full attention, as unassuming as the music seems, and to appreciate how he draws out deeper layers of American musical history, situated at the beginning of our modern perspective on recorded music.