John Fahey
The Voice of the Turtle

THE REVIEW

"Smash my guitar against the wall so I can die peacefully"

John Fahey has always made me uncomfortable, not so much the first time I listened to one of his albums, a tribute to Christmas carols, White Christmas and company played by a virtuoso of the acoustic guitar like there are so many.

I got the wrong idea, and slowly the truth revealed itself to me as I delved like Captain Willard into the Mekong River delta in search of Colonel Kurtz: a heart of darkness. The more I immersed myself in the enchanted titles of his tracks (stuff like "The Dance of the Inhabitants of the Invisible City of Bladensburg") the more I abandoned myself to the logorrheic delirium of this man's fingerpicking, which began to fascinate and... lose me. I recognized in him an immense folk and blues musical culture, but at the same time, I understood that his soul was torn by something that we little shrimps, seeking perdition on a floating boat on a river or sitting in front of a stereo system, cannot understand.

How else would you explain that at fourteen he buys his first guitar by mail to learn church hymns and four years later already perfectly plays the Luciferian Delta blues? That he pretends to make his first album sharing with Blind Joe Death, an old bluesman who only existed in his sick imagination? That a few years later he tries to play tapes in reverse? That he fills album covers with statements and drawings mostly invented about his life? That at a certain point, he decides to sell his label Takoma to another record company and from being an independent master he becomes an errand boy, losing much of the magical enthusiasm that enveloped his work?

Listening to "The Voice of the Turtle" (1968) with the right sensitivity perhaps everything will be clear. I said perhaps, because you have to be able to grasp the sense that links all these wonders, bottleneck blues with a dark flavor, country ballads accompanied by the fiddle that ignite dances, folk arpeggios that gracefully rest on the breath of a flute. Accept all this "classicism" as a given and then instead delve into horror, combining Tibetan raga with Californian psychedelia (A Raga Called Pat). Or in the extraordinary story of Dorothy Gooch, with those deep piano chords paving the way for a desperate guitar blues that tears at the soul... who is afraid of Dorothy Gooch?

The voice of the turtle dove is a verse from the "Song of Songs," but Fahey (?) gets the translation wrong: does the voice of the turtle exist? And above all, does John Fahey exist? Is he that lanky young guitarist who looks like a postal worker from Takoma, or that bloated bear with a white beard, tired and depleted, who in the last years of his life acidly pizzes on everyone, especially those who laud him as the father of New Age?

In my opinion, he is one of the inhabitants of the invisible city of Bladensburg. You can still find him playing around those parts.