“I never considered for a minute that I had talent. What I did have was divine inspiration and an open subconscious.” (1)

In 1963, after graduating from American University in Washington, D.C. with an undergraduate degree in philosophy and religion, John Fahey came to study philosophy at UC Berkeley. While here he lived on Mt. Diablo near the city of Clayton.

I met him in the men’s bathroom at Wheeler Hall in early 1964. We got into conversation about terms we had to understand for the mid-term exam in an Introduction to Logic class. We never really hung out much but from time to time I’d go to hear him perform.  His fusion of old-time and intricate finger picking was mesmerizing. He had an appreciative audience in Berkeley, but the feeling wasn’t entirely mutual. His iconoclastic individualism wasn’t exactly in tune with Berkeley’s radical political activism and the civil rights protest music that was very popular at the time.

He’d taught himself to play on a $17 Sears guitar when he was 14, picking up basics from an Eddie Arnold songbook. As his interest grew and his technique progressed he began learning from records of folk, bluegrass and blues, and started writing his own music.

His racially prejudiced upbringing in Maryland during the 1950s had made him avoid black blues and gospel until one day he had what he called “some kind of hysterical conversion.” He heard Blind Willie Johnson singing “Praise God I’m Satisfied” and broke down in tears. The experience had such an impact on him that he traveled into the Deep South and walked door to door in poor Black neighborhoods searching out records that people would sell to him.

In 1959, believing no established record company would understand his music, he started his own label, Takoma Records, with a borrowed investment of $300 and money from his work at a 24-hour gas station. Fahey’s debut album was credited to a Blind Joe Death, an invention he promoted as an actual person who’d taught him to play on a guitar made from a baby’s coffin. It made little impression at the time, but today the album is seen as an artistic milestone.

I heard John playing songs from “Blind Joe Death” as well as many other originals and old-time standards at the Jabberwock Coffeehouse and at Freight and Salvage. One evening at the Jabberwock, during his second set a guitar string broke. While talking, laughing and drinking from an open fifth of bourbon, he wound the replacement string tight, stretched it out and continued performing, looking up now and then with an amused, sardonic glance as if coming from an inner-world he could not or would not share.

Fat Dog, owner of Subway Guitars, once told me that Fahey showed up for a gig at the Freight and Salvage without his guitar. “Fatty” lent the coffeehouse a good one (possibly a Gibson J-50), but knowing how much alcohol Fahey was consuming those days, the loan was made on the condition that the house would take full responsibility for the instrument. Without a word, John walked off with the guitar after the show. Fahey was, by all accounts, impulsive and unpredictable.

By the mid-80s Epstein Barr syndrome and diabetes had him on a deep decline into confusion, loneliness and alcohol.  With help from psychoanalysis, which he said helped him face the fear, grief and anger he’d carried all his life, he made a comeback in the 90s with two albums: “Return of the Repressed” and “City of Refuge.”  

Fahey died following sextuple-bypass surgery in 2001.

(1)  https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/john_fahey_206716