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"Guitarist, Inventor, Engineer, Eternal Child"
Saw "Oh Brother Where Art Thou" last night. I get the feeling I'm the only person in the world who can't stand the Cohen Bro's. This one is even worse than "Fargo" One more big ethnic slur. These guys just love a good stereotype. I chuckled at the jokes at times and enjoyed a scene which was nearly identical to a frightning vision I had years ago on a mushroom trip. In this case it wasn't frightning or psychedelic, but it was cute. All their stuff is cute, I'll give them that. And they are usually decent craftsmen (yawn) but this time they don't even have that going for them. For what it's worth, I found this one to be another big stinker.
February 22, 2001
GUITAR INNOVATOR JOHN FAHEY DIES AT 61
"Guitarist John Fahey, whose eccentric acoustic stylings influenced a
generation of musicians, died this morning at Salem Hospital in Salem, OR
after undergoing a sextuple bypass operation 48 hours previously.
John Fahey was born on February 28, 1939 in Takoma Park, MD. His father
played popular songs on the piano and Irish harp, and his mother was also a
pianist. John spent his youth raising wood turtles and fishing in the
Susquehawa River and upper Chesapeake Bay. On Sundays the family went to the
New River Ranch in nearby Rising Sun, MD where they heard the top country
and hillbilly groups of the day, like Bill Monroe and The Stanley Brothers.
On a fishing trip in 1952 John met a black singer and guitarist named Frank
Hovington, whose fingerpicking style so intrigued John that he bought his
first guitar soon thereafter, a Sears Roebuck model that cost him $17.00,
and started teaching himself to play.
After getting a B.A. in Philosophy and Religion from American University,
Fahey moved to Berkeley, CA in 1963, where he established his own label,
Takoma Records, and began his long recording career. The following year he
moved to Los Angeles, got an M.A. in Folklore and Mythology from UCLA, and
was instrumental in the rediscovery of blues artists Skip James and Bukka
White. He expanded the Takoma label to include fellow guitarists Leo Kottke
and Peter Lang, among many others, and New Age pioneer George Winston was
another whose early career was nourished by the quirky innovator. In recent
years the Takoma catalog has been purchased by Fantasy Records of Berkeley,
CA, and Fahey's Takoma LPs are now being systematically reissued on CD.
Fantasy Records executive Bill Belmont called Fahey "a true American musical
genius."
Although Fahey preferred to be known as an American primitivist, he was
widely acknowledged as the "godfather of the New Age guitar movement," and
his recordings (over thirty albums for a wide variety of labels) showcased
his ongoing musical explorations. Several were sonic explorations in the
alternative music vein, and all had exotic titles (a 19-minute excursion was
called "On the Death and Disembowelment of the New Age," while another was
called "Old Girlfriends and Other Disasters." At the same time, he never
lost his early love for traditional and roots music forms, and during the
early 1990s he formed another record label, Revenant, to reissue classic
recordings of early blues and old time music. At the time of his death he
was working on a new album, "Summertime and Other Sultry Songs."
For further information ,contact Mary Katherine Aldin or Mitch Greenhill via
email at info@folkloreproductions.com or by phone at (310) 451-0767."
fyi, there is a special identification day tomorrow at the museum of natural history...bring in Dave, bugs, natural objects that you need id'd....