John Fahey
The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party and Other Excursions

To those who paid attention to seemingly insignificant things, a tank full of diesel in a quiet little Maryland town might have uncovered a world.

In Takoma Park, a twenty-year-old boy who spends all his money on dusty 78 rpm records of Delta Blues displays his debut album at the gas station where he has been working for some time, hoping to sell a few copies.

It is 1959, the boy's name is John Aloysius Fahey, and the record is a mysterious jest, a kind of historical hoax shrouded in a dense fog. The bare cover reads: JOHN FAHEY (on one side) — BLIND JOE DEATH (on the other). On the first side, the young guitarist resurrects some traditional pieces from the blues' âge d'or, written, among others, by W. C. Handy and Arthur Blind Blake. On the second side, it's Blind Joe Death who plays, although Blind Joe Death never actually existed. With this naive nom de plume, the young musician signs some pieces of devilish and hypnotic blues for solo guitar, worthy of a mute and dreamy Robert Johnson.

The Mississippi blues is to the serene John Fahey like the fragrant earth upon which to grow, with just the warmth of fingers on six strings of a guitar, raw and exquisite flowers like buttercup, poppy, or broom, happy in deserts. With this confidence with the instrument, Fahey engraves and weaves delicate sound mazes that seem to have arisen on their own at night, dahlias still dewy from the morning frost. By turning the soil with his hands, he uncovers forgotten golden roots, like an archaeologist of the imaginary.

Far from the coordinates of his time, his imagination feeds on faded records of Skip James, Charlie Patton, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Willie Johnson; on spirituals and blind bluesmen, on steam trains, deserts and abandoned shacks, and cotton plantations, on muddy rivers of sorrows and transformations, on macabre dances and thorny yet gentle flowers, on dawn wanderers and Pauline verses, on sleeping and invisible villages and hearts of glass, and pilgrims buried by memory and the parched southern soil.

Yet, death is his true obsession. And the essence of his music lies in that impalpable art of sublimation and enchantment: the Requiem —which, time and again, tells of forgotten lives— and the labyrinth. This album, The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party and Other Excursions, is more than any other a sound labyrinth, where death and life swirl and meld.

But in him simmers a perpetual dissatisfaction, a need to look elsewhere: it's 1966, and by looking elsewhere, J. Fahey grafts, onto the gnarly and primitive roots of the blues, a nameless shrub scented of distant lands; coloring his music with a thousand different echoes and being astonished in the face of the invisible.

Death and the desert, and always that labyrinth. Like a dreamlike Alhambra.

Soon, however, for John Fahey, the mystical finger stylist, the stranger of his time, this labyrinth of his will become a cage. Goldfinch, minotaur, and fish out of water, Fahey squirming will seek elsewhere to calm the turmoil stirring in his chest.