John Fahey: I was about thirteen and I saw some other guys, older than me, they were meeting girls in the park in the summer by taking guitars out and playing them and singing country western, so I bought a seventeen dollar Sears and Roebuck Silver charm, the action was about that high, and I got to know these guys and they helped me out with a few chords and stuff. But I didn’t meet any girls that way until about ten years later. On the other hand I did learn how to play the guitar.
S: What type of music were you listening to?
J: Well, lets see at that time I was listening at first just to country western and then the radio station we listened to to hear country western, in Washington D.C, changed it’s format and started playing nothing but Bluegrass. So then I got very interested in Bluegrass. Early Bluegrass is my favorite kind of music, not to many people know that. But I couldn’t learn to play it because you had to play so fast, you know? So I learnt a few country western songs, I bought a chord book, and right away I started writing my own stuff, which nobody else did that, I don’t know why. I had a big background in listening to classical music and I started trying to compose, like I was playing the guitar but I heard an orchestra in my head. So I was really composing for full orchestra and of course I didn’t know enough chords or harmonies yet but I came up with some interesting stuff.
S: What were some of the tunes in that period?
J: Oh you know the first song I wrote completely was that one I did on today’s lesson called "On the sunny side of the ocean". I think I was fourteen when I did that one. See my father knew a lot about music, he played the piano and he would do theory and stuff like that, but I didn’t learn anything from him, but I played that for him and he liked it a lot. Then the next song I wrote he didn’t like. But that was one of my earliest songs, as complex as it is.
S: When did you leave the Washington D.C. area?
J: Oh, 1962. The music scene was so bad that several of us decided to come out to Berkeley and take over the folk music scene here. And there were about forty of us actually who came out. This was something we planned at Parties; ED Denson was in on it, a lot of other people, and we came out gradually, but we made quite an impact here, which was impossible in Washington D.C.
J: (Laughs) Well when I made my first record I thought it would be a good joke to have me on one side, have the lable say John Fahey on one side, and this guy Blind Joe Death on the other side. The reason it said "blind" is because a lot of the people I learned from were on old 78 RPM records and a lot of them were blind, and their names were Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Joe Taggart, on and on, a whole bunch of them were blind. So me and a guy named Greg Eldridge we were sitting around drinking a beer one night and I was trying to find a catchy name for the other guy and he was helping me and he finally said "Blind Joe Death", and I said "um, That’s it". Also I was thinking, when ever you print the word "Death" people look at it and I was thinking of record sales already even though I was only going to have a hundred copies pressed. (laughs).
S: Whose idea was it to do a record?
J: Oh, my idea. I thought I’d be wasting my time to go to commercial record companies and make demos for them, because don’t forget, I was doing what I was doing and nobody understood what I was doing. Even Sam Charters, I still have a letter from 1959, where I sent Charters a copy of my first record and he wrote me back to tell me how terrible I was and how Jack Elliot and so on and so forth were much better than me. He completely misunderstood what I was trying to do. But that was OK. I understood what I was trying to do.
S: What were you trying to do?
J: Well I was on the one hand, the more I played the guitar the more I began to really love the guitar and to love virtually any kind of music that anybody played well on guitar. In the music I was composing I was trying to express my emotions, my so called negative emotions, which were depression, anger and so forth. Like Stan Kenton did. He got away with it. I ‘ve always admired him for that. I listen to Stan Kenton a lot then and I still do. And I was trying to put together some distant music, I was thinking mainly of Bartok as a model, but played in this finger picking pattern, which I still use. So I was trying to put those things together into a coherent musical language which people would understand and it worked pretty good. Everybody else was just trying to copy folk musicians, I wasn’t trying to do that. I was using them as teachers for technique but I was never trying to be a folk. How can I be a folk? I’m from the suburbs you know.
