Splicetoday

Music
Aug 06, 2009, 10:56AM

"Unknown Bards"

Back to the roots of the blues

Late in 1998 or early in ’99 – during the winter that stradled the two – I spent a night on and off the telephone with a person named John Fahey. I was a junior editor at the Oxford American magazine, which at that time had its offices in Oxford, Mississippi; Fahey, then almost sixty and living in Room 5 of a welfare motel outside Portland, Oregon, was himself, whatever that was: a channeler of some kind, certainly; a “pioneer” (as he once described his great hero, Charley Patton) “in the externalization through music of strange, weird, even ghastly emotional states.”

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