The Film   | The Myth  |  The Music

as well as Fahey’s ferocious and utterly compelling experimental tape collages of ambient sound and guitar in the musique concrète style of modern Europe. 

Finally, in the last years of his life, Fahey proved to be an inventive sonic voyageur of electric guitar, garnering new audiences and collaborative admirers, including members of the hugely influential New York band Sonic Youth.

Fahey was a respected folklorist and musicologist who garnered his Master’s Degree from the University of California at Los Angeles where he penned an essential study of the American blues genius Charley Patton.

Born in Washington, DC in 1939 and raised in Takoma Park, Maryland, Fahey liked to say that he bought his first cheap guitar at Sears & Roebuck at 13 years old to pick up girls. In his formative years, Fahey was a disciplined and voracious student of musical forms. Classical, bluegrass, blues, doo-wop and jazz percolated in his head as he developed his inimitable, soulful style.

John Fahey died in Salem, Oregon in 2001. A great musician, raconteur, trickster and a wonderful writer, John Fahey was a twentieth-century renaissance man. In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey will touch people around the world as a portrait of an artist of creative genius, unfathomable energy, wondrous humour and indomitable will.

Fahey often played blues inflected solo guitar, but his enormous catalogue of recordings reveals a complex musical tapestry with Brazilian, classical, New Orleans jazz, orchestration featuring numerous stringed instruments…

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.

Gene Rosenthal, Courtesy Adelphi Records, Inc.