John Fahey – Christmas With John Fahey Volume 2 (1975)

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John Fahey
Christmas With John Fahey, Volume II
Released 1975



 1. Oh Holy Night
 2. Christmas Medley: Oh Tannenbaum, Angels We Have Heard On High, Jingle Bells
 3.  Russian Christmas Overture
4. White Christmas
5. Carol Of The Bells
6. Christmas Fantasy (Parts One & Two)


Tracks 1,2,3 and 5 are in duet with Richard Ruskin.
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Recorded at United/Western Recording, Los Angeles
Mastered at Fidelatone by Bruce Leek
Artwork by Stephanie Pyren


CD pressing 1986, Takoma Records
thanks to Rab Hines for the rip

Well this medicine may be too late to cure the auditory disease known as Christmas Music Earworms, considering that many of you have been subjected to the stuff for well on two months now.  But better late than never.

This is a holiday record by that most unlikely Santa Claus, guitarist John Fahey.  He had released an earlier (and far superior) Christmas album called The New Possiblity, hence this one being dubbed a “Volume 2.”  It is not your average Xmas record and probably won’t fit on a playlist with Johnny Mathis.  Just stare at the album cover for a while and you will swear that somebody spiked your eggnog with something a bit stronger than rum.

While the New Possibility was a revelation for me, this record is a little bit of something that Fahey rarely was: predictable.  And I say a LITTLE BIT because it’s not an entirely fair criticism.   Maybe he just had so much fun making the first one that he was compelled to make a second, or maybe there was commercial incentive involved.  The album is consistently pleasant, but there just aren’t many surprises until you get to the second side.  “Oh Holy Night” is pretty but kind of tame, and the Christmas medley is actually kind of bad.  Things get much, much better with the Russian Christmas Overture.  White Christmas has the kind of halting slippages that make you think they might be mistakes but then we all know Fahey was a genius and MEANT it to sound that way, right?   This is the only track on the first side that is not a guitar duet with Richard Ruskin (who also had three records put out on Fahey’s Takoma label).  Maybe that is at the core of my misgivings – Ruskin is an excellent guitarist, but so much of what charms me about Fahey are his idiosyncrasies coupled with his mastery of the instrument, and  when playing with other musicians those idiosyncrasies are by necessity kept in check.  “Carol of the Bell” is quite gorgeous, however.

The second side of the original album is one long, meandering acoustic guitar experiment called “Christmas Fantasy” – the kind of Fahey you had begun to desperately miss after five fairly straight arrangements.   Playing all on his lonesome, he can manipulate time and space and bring me to that same cocoon-like, familiar place as his most cryptic and dense material, and make me feel welcome with Yuletide cheer.  It sounds mostly improvised although knowing Fahey it is probably more planned-out than it sounds.  As fun as it is, it almost feels like over-compensating for the straight readings of the material on the first side.  A bit self-indulgent, maybe, although I don’t mind it when Fahey indulged himself.

From the very first notes of “Joy To The World” on The New Possibility, you knew you just signed on to a singular experience.  Possibly bordering on the transcendent.  Traditional Christmas material approached with Fahey’s vast musical knowledge but none of the reverence usually accorded to it.  I don’t use the word “irreverence” because it’s not as if there was anything iconoclastic about the record – it was just refracted through Fahey’s interpretive lens, which was always kind of bent. The “Volume II” album, on the other hand, comes across mostly as just straight-up Christmas music that happens to be played by John Fahey and a friend (except for the bonkers second half). 

John Fahey – The New Possibility: John Fahey's Guitar Soli Christmas Album (1968)

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“The New Possibility: John Fahey’s Guitar Soli Christmas Album”

Released 1968 on Takoma Records C-1020
Reissue 1986 Takoma Records CDP 727-20
Distributed by Allegiance Records
Japanese disc pressing

John Fahey – Guitar

CD Mastering by Michael Boshears

1. Joy to the World
2. What Child Is This?
3. Medley- Hark, the Herald Angels Sing, O Come All Ye Faithful
4. We Three Kings of Orient Are
5. Auld Lang Syne
6. The Bells of St. Mary’s
7. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen Fantasy
8. Go I Will Send Thee
9. Good King Wenceslas
10. The First Noel
11. It Came Upon a Midnight Clear
12. Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming
13. Silent Night, Holy Night
14. Christ’s Saints of God Fantasy

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I am on principle oppossed to the very idea of “Christmas music” records. It does not even stem from my firm self-identification as an agnostic pantheist that I feel such strong opposition. It is purely out of my allegiance to the idea of good music, or — if you must — music snobbery. Holiday music just tends to bring out the worst in everybody. I don’t even have to use the new Bob Dylan record as an example, because everyone knows that album was recorded as a Dadist satire resulting from a bar bet Dylan lost to Allen Ginsburg in New York in 1963 and he is only just now getting around to honoring it. No, with very few exceptions, “Christmas music” is one of the stronger arguments for atheism out there.

Not so with John Fahey’s wonderful “The New Possibility” recorded in 1968. Committed to tape with more pathos than piety, this record emerges as a sober meditation amidst a string of more irreverent, experimental, and chaotic work that Fahey was engaged in while acting as self-appointed curator and deconstructionist of the entire musical canon that would someday be termed ‘Americana.’ In this auditory journey he proves himself equally adept at plumbing the depths of European as well as (North) American folk musics in selecting his Yuletide favorites. Fahey’s guitar playing is not at its best here (in fact his slide playing on ‘Silent Night’ ranks among his most sloppy and careless) but the oneness of intent with which he carries it all off makes technique unimportant. Fahey put out a few other Christmas albums after this, all of them more polished, but this one is by far the most compelling. It’s just him, his guitar, and a wallop of plate reverb. If you listen close you can hear some pretty drastic tape splices but if they don’t bother me that much, then chances are they won’t bother you either.

There are some obvious choices here in the repertoire — Joy to the World, Aud Lang Syn, The First Noel – but all are given new life in Fahey’s hands. The less obvious choices are especially a delight – William Dix’s hymn “What Child Is This?”, more familiar to our ears as “Greensleeves” being one of them. Other fine performances are “Go I Will Send Thee”, a blues rendition of a black spiritual, and “Lo, How A Rose E’re Blooming”, which might well be my favorite song on the whole record, a sixteenth-century German song (Es ist ein Ros entsprungen) that found its way into the Anglophone songbook in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Also of note is his slow finger-picked version of “The Bells of Saint Mary’s”, which according to legend inspired yet another version of the song played with mallets on white mice that charted as a hit single during the Christmas season of 1969 (reaching #13 in the UK, #27 in the US, and #1 in Japan).

Fahey simply can’t restrain himself from some experimentation, and he stretches out on “Christ’s Saints of God Fantasy”, a loose and freeflowing adaptation of a J.C. Hopkins tune that, oddly enough, has a copyrighted interpretation on file from Madeline Peyroux although I am not sure if she ever recorded it.

An interesting oddity about this 1986 CD pressing — the inlay card has the last two songs out of order, listing ‘Silent Night’ as the closing track. In fact Silent Night is the logical choice to end the album, and it appears to have been so with all vinyl pressings (I am not sure about subsequent CD reissues). The track order is printed correctly on the disc itself (by which I mean, correctly as the music contained on it plays). You might want to do some rearranging in you music player of choice and put Silent Night back where it belongs, at the end of the record….

Original cover
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John Fahey – The Voice of the Turtle (1968) VBR

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JOHN FAHEY
Voice of the Turtle

Released 1968,Takoma Records
Issued on CD 1996

1. Bottleneck Blues 3:03
2. Bill Cheatum 1:52
3. Lewisdale Blues 2:13
4. Bean Vine Blues 2:42
5. Bean Vine Blues 2:48
6. A Raga Called Pat 9:03
7. A Raga Called Pat 4:25
8. Train 1:44
9. Je Ne Me Suis Revellais Matin Pas En May 2:19
10. The Story Of Dorothy Gooch 5:24
11. Nine-Pound Hammer 1:57
12. Lonesome Valley 1:42

Review by Richie Ubermench

Like some of John Fahey’s other projects in the ’60s, this was actually recorded and assembled over a few years, and primarily composed of duets with various other artists (including overdubs with his own pseudonym, “Blind Joe Death”). One of his more obscure early efforts, Voice of the Turtle is both able and wildly eclectic, going from scratchy emulations of early blues 78s and country fiddle tunes to haunting guitar-flute combinations and eerie ragas. “A Raga Called Pat, Part III” and “Part IV” is a particularly ambitious piece, its disquieting swooping slide and brief bits of electronic white noise reverb veering into experimental psychedelia. Most of this is pretty traditional and acoustic in tone, however, though it has the undercurrent of dark, uneasy tension that gives much of Fahey’s ’60s material its intriguing combination of meditation and restlessness.

Someone wrote on some website you might know:

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
–, December 14, 2003
By Benjamin S. Sandstrom (Minnetonka, MN United States)
I don’t know the complete story behind this record in reference to it being a hoax or a put-on or who played what. What I do know is that it’s my favorite John Fahey record, and if that makes me less enlightened than the average Fahey fan, I can live with that.

I don’t think it’s important that this record spends less time spotlighting Fahey’s guitar virtuosity than is normally the case. This is a record that’s about a certain ambience created by collage, and the fact that Fahey uses unknown accompanists and found sounds makes it no less authentic or personal than his other guitar-only recordings that the Byronic Fahey enthusiasts long for. What’s essentially important about the record is that Fahey was responsible for it, assembled it, and that it was born out of his head, if not always his hand. That’s why it’s valid.

As much of a purist as Fahey could be – perhaps wishing that he were around 40 years earlier to learn first-hand from his influences – he wasn’t an irrational purist. By that I mean he wasn’t afraid to like or use technology. He didn’t use technology as paint, so to speak, but rather as his brush, and ‘Voice of the Turtle’ was his most complete technological statement. It was extremely rare that Fahey used an electronic sound in his music, yet the way he assembled certain songs – and the the entire ‘Voice of the Turtle’ album – was influenced by modern technology in the form of found sounds and the occasional electronic drone or squak. The third and fourth ‘A Raga Called Pat’s on ‘Voice of the Turtle’, as well as the first two on ‘Days Have Gone By’ are not adventurous because they abandon his roots, they’re adventurous because they express his roots and vision differently. Instead of simulating an environment, an era, or a mood on guitar, Fahey gives them to you – straight-up – and then does his musical thing, whether it be guitar or something else, on top of it, making those pieces into virtual field recordings, and what’s more ‘Fahey’ than a field recording? That’s right – nothing. His roots and vision did not change on those pieces.

By saying that ‘Voice of the Turtle’ was Fahey’s most complete technological statement, I don’t imply that he necessarily used more technology than on any other record. It has to do with the coherence of the technology and how it brings the record together rather than isolating certain songs as in the case of ‘Days Have Gone By’ and ‘Requia’. The way the ‘A Raga Called Pat’s, ‘The Story of Dorothy Gooch, Part 1’ and the drone that opens and closes the record work against the more traditional material is purposeful, not merely experimental. The above songs give the more upbeat traditional pieces an interesting subtext of menace that suggests that even in good times, trouble is never far. They also re-inforce the doom-laden crossroads mythology that Fahey liked to play with in some of his delta blues pieces.

I can understand how ‘Voice of the Turtle’ can be lost on some who appreciate Fahey’s technique first and foremost, but what I can’t understand is why Fahey’s technique is first and foremost. He was one of the greatest artists of his time, avoiding retro by taking the time to understand history and then coming back again into the present to show us what he found and how it’s really the same.

John Fahey – Days Have Gone By (1967) VBR

Sometimes, when I wake up on a summer morning, I listen to John Fahey.

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JOHN FAHEY
Days Have Gone By, Volume 6

(1967; Reissued 2006 Takoma UK)

1. Revolt of the Dyke Brigade
2. Impressions of Susan
3. Joe Kirby Blues
4. Night Train of Valhalla
5. Portland Cement Factory at Monolith, California
6. Raga Called Pat, Pt. 1
7. Raga Called Pat, Pt. 2
8. My Shepherd Will Supply My Needs
9. My Grandfather’s Clock
10. Days Have Gone By
11. We Should Be Building

Review by Ronnie D. Lankford, Jr.

Sam Graham once referred to Fahey as the “curmudgeon of the acoustic guitar,” while producer Samuel Charters noted that Fahey “was the only artist I ever worked with whose sales went down after he made public appearances.” This tumultuous spirit, in turn, made tumultuous music on albums like Days Have Gone By, filled with odd harmonics, discord, and rare beauty. The esoteric titles like “Night Train of Valhalla” stand beside more abrasive ones like “The Revolt of the Dyke Brigade.” Fahey’s guitar work on the latter song, however, does little to evoke the title. Instead, it reminds one of what might happen if a guitar player from the Far East, familiar with open tunings, interpreted Blind Blake. “Impressions of Susan” combines the same odd tunings with nice, and at times joyful, fingerpicking. Dissonance, though, remains the primary mood that Fahey’s guitar resonates. “The Portland Cement Factory at Monolith, California” begins with a lovely cascade of notes, only to fall into odd harmonics that create a pensive foreboding. To call attention to the disharmony and discord, though, is not a criticism. Days Have Gone By, like all of Fahey’s early- and mid-’60s work, expands American blues traditions by enriching the palette of the guitar with Eastern tunings. He may create a challenging work like “A Raga Called Pat–Part Two” that is difficult to interpret, but its opulence is undeniable. Fahey has often been grouped with new age music but this — especially with his early work — is somewhat of a misnomer. New age strives to build harmony; Fahey revels in conflict. Days Have Gone By is another rewarding reissue of the master’s classic ’60s work and will be eagerly greeted by guitar aficionados.