The John Fahey canon is a decreasingly mysterious thing. For that, you can thank Fantasy Records. Over the past year or so, Fantasy has reissued some of Fahey’s most obscure and mythologized releases from his own Takoma label. While Blind Joe Death and The Voice Of The Turtle have benefited from the digital treatment, Fantasy’s recent reissue of America is the biggest debunker to date.
Though the America sessions yielded over 80 minutes of music, Fahey worried that a double album wouldn’t sell, so he pared thirteen tracks down to just four. The Fantasy reissue restores those nine lost tracks — almost. Even the compact disc can’t hold the whole of Fahey’s expansive vision, but it comes damn close, presenting, as the liner notes cite, “98.6 percent of the music recorded for America.” Kind of like taking a national census and leaving out Rhode Island.
Heard in near-entirety, America transcends its already classic standing and becomes one of the most ambitious and epic records Fahey ever made. Roger McGuinn once explained how he intended Sweetheart Of The Rodeo to be nothing less than a history of mankind in song. But faced with commercial concerns similar to Fahey’s, he settled on a history of the 20th century. And even that’s a stretch.
Fahey may have intended something altogether different for America, but with it, he comes closer to realizing McGuinn’s idea than The Byrds ever did. Fahey sees an America that is older and wiser than its founding fathers. He sees an America that Skip James, Dvorak, even Jesus H. Christ himself call home.
Fahey probably doesn’t like The Byrds, but I’ll bet he loves The Band. To these ears, America sounds like an answer to their classic first two albums recorded around the same time. As with those records America unfolds like a runaway train in no particular hurry to get anywhere; gathering steam here, threatening to derail there. It is informed yet untainted, abused yet bucolic. It defies its physical and historical time.
In the liner notes, Charles M. Young makes a case for the “Fahey effect,” claiming that listening to his records enhances one’s powers of concentration. But there are many John Faheys, and many Fahey effects. While Young’s premise holds true for Fahey’s more focused efforts (say, Far Forward Voyagers), other records (say, Of Rivers and Religion, which, by the way, offers an interesting counterpoint to America) encourage an almost whimsical distraction. But if you’re seeking one man’s ruminations on a world that has both enchanted and forsaken him, America is the Fahey effect you’re looking for.
