The Man  |  The Music   |  The Myth

We will not engage in hagiography, nostalgia or sentimentalism. John Fahey was a great artist… a genius to some. He was also a complex, imperfect man who had his demons. In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey will do visual, intellectual and artistic justice to the rich panorama of Americana and the universe encompassed in John Fahey’s mind. 

In narrative terms, viewers will hear most frequently from Fahey himself, both in video and audio recordings made during his lifetime and in voice-over from his outstanding prose which will be read by a dramatic actor. The film narrative will further rely on a small handful of informants with intimate and highly nuanced appreciations of John Fahey’s life and times. These informants will include his former wife, the visual artist Melody Fahey, guitarists Terry Robb and Pete Townshend; Fahey’s partner in Revenant Records and friend Dean Blackwood; Grammy Award winning musicologist Rob Bowman; and the writer and author Li Robbins.

Inventive and highly cinematic video recordings from the film locations will visually support and evoke for audiences the natural and urban environments that inspired Fahey’s work. We will tape in the area of Washington, DC where Fahey grew up; in Mississippi Delta, where he pursued a quest to understand the origins of blues music; and in Salem, Oregon and the rain forest of the Columbia River gorge which nurtured the extraordinary, sometimes troubling, artistic out-put of the last 15 years of Fahey’s career and life.

In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey will be a biographical documentary that will visually evoke the vision of a great artist. It will employ beautifully textured, non-linear, cinematic and thoroughly entertaining means to launch a wide audience into the universe constructed and inhabited by John Fahey.  The film will rely first and foremost on the music of John Fahey. With the active support and cooperation of both The John Fahey Trust and Dean Blackwood of Revenant Records, the second of Fahey’s own recording companies, the film will access a rich and otherwise inaccessible Fahey archive of musical recordings, moving images, photographs, prose and paintings. The visual archive of Fahey performing is very rich. The collection of photographs is equally extensive. We will further augment this live action archive with short animated sequences that will evoke Fahey’s artistic, imagined universe.

Ayal Senior

Li Robbins

Terry Robb

Tim Knight

Melody Fahey

Rob Bowman

PRODUCTION STILLS

Pete Townshend

Townshend & crew

Joey Burns

Photography courtesy of  The John Fahey Trust, Jessica Anne Cullingham, Igal Hecht, Stefan Grossman, Paul Kelly, Marc Minsker, Gene Rosenthal & Doug Whyte.

Produced with the support of The John Fahey Trust.