Blind Joe Death's America

John Fahey, the Blues, and Writing White Discontent

George Henderson

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469660790
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

For over sixty years, American guitarist John Fahey (1939–2001) has been a storied figure, first within the folk and blues revival of the long 1960s, later for fans of alternative music. Mythologizing himself as Blind Joe Death, Fahey crudely parodied white middle-class fascination with African American blues, including his own. In this book, George Henderson mines Fahey's parallel careers as essayist, notorious liner note stylist, musicologist, and fabulist for the first time. These vocations, inspired originally by Cold War educators' injunction to creatively express rather than suppress feelings, took utterly idiosyncratic and prescient turns. Fahey voraciously consumed ideas: in the classroom, the counterculture, the civil rights struggle, the new left; through his study of philosophy, folklore, African American blues; and through his experience with psychoanalysis and southern paternalism. From these, he produced a profoundly and unexpectedly refracted vision of America. To read Fahey is to vicariously experience devastating critical energies and self-soothing uncertainty, passions emerging from a singular location—the place where lone, white rebel sentiment must regard the rebellion of others. Henderson shows the nuance, contradictions, and sometimes brilliance of Fahey's words that, though they were never sung to a tune, accompanied his music.

PART I | Where Did You Go, John Fahey?

Introduction

It’s 1967 and John Fahey has the music critic for Stanford University’s student newspaper right where he wants him. In late October, Jerry Fogel had written about Fahey that “there is no relative standpoint from which one can assess his significance or influence.” Fahey is incomparable, a “genius in contemporary music.” Fahey’s new record, Requia, was coming out the following month, in time for his campus concert. “Fahey’s music is intensely personal,” Fogel warns. “Each person interprets it differently, his own emotions contributing directly to the total effect. It is possible for one person to be wholly absorbed in a composition, while another is completely unaffected” (Fogel, “John Fahey: A Guitarist Like” 6). A few weeks later, the day of the concert, Fogel found the comparison he’d been looking for earlier. At the very time of Fahey’s concert, Nicholas Katzenbach, President Johnson’s undersecretary of state, would be giving a lecture on campus. While Katzenbach will be “bringing a message of concern,” Fogel says, “those in the Tresidder Large Lounge will be hearing a different, perhaps more significant message. John Fahey will be performing” (Fogel, “John Fahey: The Guitarist of Relevance” 6). Katzenbach was one of the architects of U.S. civil rights legislation, a man who as deputy U.S. attorney general had stood down Governor George Wallace at the University of Alabama when Wallace physically tried to rebuff court-ordered integration. At Stanford, however, Katzenbach would be defending Johnson’s Vietnam policy (Rolph; Kitsman). There were ample reasons, therefore, for every student to attend his lecture and certainly for many to protest it. (A planned protest never materialized.) Compared with the under secretary, though, “there is an inscrutable quality in John Fahey and his music,” writes Fogel, “something beyond his appearance and his talent. It is something that almost invariably leaves the listener with the idea that he has experienced something very relevant—more relevant, perhaps, than the temporal message of an Undersecretary of State” (Fogel, “John Fahey: The Guitarist of Relevance” 6).

Fahey, Katzenbach—what a rich comparison. But it was hardly far-fetched in its context. Fogel simply invokes that branch of Movement dialogue concerned with inner fulfillment while keeping the concern with social justice at bay. (In other writing, Fogel would change lanes, decrying “imperialist war, loss of personal freedom, prejudice” [“Baez”].) In fact, as if in perfect alignment with Fogel, Fahey’s liner notes for Requia make virtually the same ploy, although he finds a substitute for Katzenbach. Fahey directly asks readers to favorably compare his personal experiences and struggles with those addressed by the “social-action theologians.” The point is not really that Fogel and Fahey are making rich comparisons. The point is to ask how, for someone like John Fahey, did writing become the place where self-expression is learned as “good”? Once learned as “good” where could that appetite go? With an essay from 1956 as its focus, chapter 1 situates Fahey within the history of the idea and practice of written self-expression, self-awareness, and self-actualization as values that were institutionalized in public schools, especially during and after World War II.¹ In that essay, titled “My Dear Old Alma Mater”—Fahey either was in his senior year of high school or had just graduated—are the seeds of the balancing act between personal and social values he would perform later, in writings like the Requia notes. I show in chapter 2 how the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis, which broke wide into the public sphere in the 1950s and were each concerned with American, capitalist childhood, explicitly shaped Fahey as a writer too. His essay “Communism,” written well after the 1960s, is a wistful memoir of a raucous childhood spent in a white suburb of Takoma Park, deeply informed by a psychoanalytical framing.

The Requia notes enrich our reading of each essay. They contain some of the same interest in self-expression as Fahey’s 1956 work but also show he had not become the “agitator” that work seemingly foretold. Just the same, Requia furtively glances at the social and political activism of its day, as if Fahey wants to justify his absence and distance himself from his own distance. The Requia notes enrich our reading of the “Communism” essay of later years too. For that essay gazes wistfully at past ideals concerning liberation, direct action, and restored innocence, which Fahey might still harbor. Yet there is zero chance he will act, hence the moody return to the “matrix of solitude”—Berman’s pitch-perfect phrase—already flagged in Requia.

In the notes to that album, Fahey writes about feelings and experiences in a confessional but also performative way for his Movement audience, serving himself up as the one who has feelings. He is not interested in moving on from feelings when they are bad. He is interested in tarrying with them, in demonstrating that a struggle should be going on within individuals over their very existence and what its meanings could be. But he also evaluates his situation in light of proclamations made by the “social-action theologians.” They are a beloved foil, much as Fogel had suggested Katzenbach was. The questions Fahey raises are implicit: Why shouldn’t existential struggle be counted among other struggles of the day? Why should one feel pressured to join a protest or a sit-in, to renew one’s alarm with every awful headline, when one must also be doing the work of accomplishing just being a person—which is made difficult by the very society that creates headline-worthy racial, class, and imperial oppression?

Requia was John Fahey’s first album for a major record label, Vanguard (Guerrieri, John Fahey, vol. 1, rev.). So, one imagines he felt a warrant to tell all to a hoped-for expanded audience who would want to know what brought Fahey to music.² It goes like this: “Since 1948, after seeing the movie, The Thief of Bagdad [John was nine years old] I composed cerebral symphonies every day. It was a pleasant pastime. But suddenly in 1953 I needed a full orchestra at my command.” As a pubescent fourteen-year-old speeding toward adulthood, he needed “to drown out with music, the new disturbing sounds I heard emanating for [sic] my own fear and ignorance of the ways of men and women.” But he was also pissed he didn’t have his driver’s license yet, and he needed music to drown out the tempting sounds of car traffic “on the road east.” In lieu of a full orchestra, “I made an orchestra out of the guitar,” which he taught himself to play. He would have liked a teacher, but “I could tolerate none, nor they me.” And he would have liked a teacher “who knew the music of men and women.” Alas, still no teacher. “So I taught myself all these things, and now I must play” (Fahey, liner notes, Requia).

Why “must play”? To express feelings, for one thing: “I can temper the guitar as I like. I can make my own tunings. I can do whatever I like with it. I am quite free with my guitar.” But also needing the money the music brings, he is not free of the guitar itself: “For some remunerative neck-strap has strung me to it.” Freedom with the guitar is no more free “than one of the strings” on his guitar, whose only freedom is “to be tuned up and down—or to break.” This limited freedom may even be futile, a nonstarter: “A broken string is thrown away even if it was ‘dead’ before, being no longer of any use to anyone at all. No not that” (Fahey, liner notes, Requia).

On and on Fahey goes: profundities fall to earth, possibly to rise again, but only to fall once more. Confession unfolds and stops short of expiation; accusations are hurled without vindication. There’s a story brewing here, never truly to get off the ground, about ineptitude, failure, rejection, or castration and impotence, if we follow the double entendre of a string tuned up and down, possibly to break. Existence is all about up down, up down. Performance is about the undercutting of performance. Fahey doesn’t want you to think he is extraordinary; he wants you to think he is really good at being extra ordinary, one with the muck of life. And that’s extraordinary. But not.

And then comes the Fogel moment as Fahey pivots:

The new social-action theologians (and many laymen as well) speak frequently of freedom these days—a new kind, they say. But I know of only one perfect freedom—and that comes to us instantaneously, at one time or another, or not at all, when we are given a chance to gamble. You hear about the game (which might frighten you) and then either you play or you don’t. If you do play you find you are free whether you win the game or not. If you don’t play, then you become (or remain) a slave. There is no middle way. And it is a rather grisly kind of gambling too, because you don’t even know what the stakes are.… You have to take a chance—a big chance. But if you don’t take that chance, don’t choose to gamble, you lose your freedom until the next game—if there is one. There is no fall up (Tillich notwithstanding), and the pressing need for social-action is self-evident to anyone who is awake. (Fahey, liner notes, Requia)

This moment is packed with allusions, and a few, such as “freedom these days,” stand out as especially legible. What “anyone who is awake” in America would have noted in the fall of 1967 is that just that summer, in city after city, African Americans had been in revolt, as they had been before that, such as in Watts in 1965. (Fahey approved his liner notes for Requia in the fall of 1967, time, in other words, to have been fully aware of that summer’s events [Guerrieri, John Fahey, vol. 1, rev.].) Whether Martin Luther King Jr. is the “social-action theologian” Fahey has in mind, King cannot be excluded as an example Fahey would point to if asked for a name. Regarding the “many laymen” propounding freedom, they are too numerous to count. It seems clear Fahey is alluding to the struggle for civil rights and why the struggle is a worthy one. “Social-action,” he argues, is a “pressing need” and a “self-evident” one at that. Not one to trumpet the cause of civil rights (“No not that”), Fahey, if quietly, gets the idea, or at least feels the need, to acknowledge it publicly on his first Vanguard record. (A year later Fahey’s second record with Vanguard came out, The Yellow Princess, which I’ll discuss below. By then King had been assassinated, so Fahey included “March!” on the album in King’s memory, regretting, in his notes to the song, that he had never marched in protest himself.)

But, in Requia, he is also right away saying that the always-already more profound idea is that, whereas racial injustice is obviously wrong, less obvious is how to set and keep a course for taking a “gamble” on individual freedom. So, yes to civil rights, but once obtained, then what? What task remains? Surely, the struggle to understand and act on the fugitive meaning of one’s own existence. But—here is the implicit question—why is that struggle hard to see? Why might a person fail to recognize their chance at it?³ This was Fahey’s concern at least since his high-school-era essay and continuing into college, where he found new language to express these ideas as a philosophy major (see part 3). And we’ll see him return to it in his “Communism” essay. His idea, shared by many social critics, is that the same postwar American society that individuates people for purposes of turning them into “workers,” “students,” “fathers,” and “mothers,” whereby they may have their civil rights, throws enormous obstacles in the path of their actually seizing their uniqueness as human beings—cue the philosophers learned about at college.

I am arguing that Fahey’s pivots toward social conscience are, like Fogel’s pivot from Katzenbach toward Fahey, much less jarring than they may seem. Ideals about individual liberation and social emancipation were part and parcel of Movement culture and at the center of its messiness. As the Movement scholar and activist Richard Flacks wrote, the problem is that the relationship between the politics of social change and the urge for individual, existential freedom defines two poles of attraction that are difficult to draw together. Tom Hayden, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society and principal architect of the Port Huron Statement, articulately states the necessity of their combination in a 1962 “manifesto” he distributed to the student activists a few months before they were to meet in Port Huron. “Freedom is more than the absence of arbitrary restrictions on personal development,” he insists. It “must be a condition of the inner self as well, achieved by reflection confronting dogma, and humility overcoming pride. ‘Participation’ means both personal initiative—that men feel obliged to help resolve social problems—and social opportunity—that society feels obliged to maximize the possibility for personal initiative to find creative outlets” (Hayden 28–29).

The problem for Fahey, even as he strongly gestures toward the mutuality that Hayden and Flacks speak of, is that even if his ordinary feelings and his struggle to deal with them may have been personally profound, the civil rights struggles and the gamble for life that Fahey alludes to cast those feelings in a rather pale light. Fahey has not, in the Requia notes, found a way to convincingly charge his personal details with significance and depth sufficient for the “gamble” that so interests him. Nor has he identified in Requia a compelling social basis for his feelings that will help his readers understand how personal feeling and experience can in fact have social significance. Not having a driver’s license just will not qualify—although this does say something about middle-class suburban circumstances that I will get to in chapter 6.

And yet is the game Fahey plays in Requia necessarily about holding himself up as a good, ennobling example of existential struggle? It may instead (or also) very well be an expression of interest in the sort of social change that prizes individual emotional honesty in whatever form it arrives, with the possibility that such courage on the part of individuals is the very source of social change and not the other way around. This reversal is implied by Fahey’s hat tip to Hegel. Fahey is interested in what happens when one commits to a freedom that is genuinely authentic: “perfect freedom,” he calls it. The only way forward with such a commitment is to risk leaving behind what one is sure of, in order to enter into a fearful “game” one might lose, but through which one finds genuine freedom. One even looks for opportunities to place oneself at risk; failing to do so ensures one remains a “slave,” a reference to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, slave being the term for anyone unable to move beyond their limited self-conception or self-activity (see part 3 for Fahey’s engagement with Hegel and existentialism). How to exceed one’s limits? Not by the self alone, claims Hegel, but through encounters with others: “I wonder what my game is,” Fahey muses, “and if I’ll be given a chance to play it with a worthy opponent. I certainly hope so” (liner notes, Requia). Sure enough we will see his hopes play out as he fights against “false gregariousness” (see chapter 1) and mass conformity (see chapter 2). The point though is that with his nod to Hegel, whose philosophy urges dialectical movements of ideas, as much as persons and society, we cannot be certain that the idea of “social-action” with which Fahey began this passage is the same “social-action” he means at the end. For it is now “self-evident” that if existential struggle inherently takes two to play, it is itself a form of social action, a nifty end run around the problem worrying Flacks and Hayden.

Fahey has no actual program in mind here. His writing quarrels, explores, tries things out, shoots from the hip, and generally forges ahead in the manner of what the left cultural historian Peter Clecak calls the “ideal self” of the 1960s (and 1970s): a self who seeks, on the basis of their own sense of identity and their own desire for a “piece of justice” that postwar movements were making possible, to form community with others who may feel similar (see Clecak). The exercise is far from innocent. For if one is going to write in 1967 of social action and freedom, toss the American legacy of slavery into the mix, which is surely Fahey’s intended double entendre in invoking Hegel, and suggest one has been a kind of slave oneself, one and the same word suiting bot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: New Possibilities
• Part I | Where Did You Go, John Fahey?
• Part II | Delta Haze
• Part III | Festivals of Democracy (Variations)
• Coda: The Unintended Story
• Notes
• References
• Index