I've been watching John Fahey videos on YouTube. I'd always liked his weird, haunting music, and of course the contact high of someone of such genius being from right around the corner was always fun. But as I move through the levels of novice guitar playing, I'm appreciating him in a whole new way. The phrasings, the tunings, the attention to detail: all stuff I didn't really grok before and am starting to be able to understand now. I'm still far from even being able to attempt to learn a song like his arrangement of "Poor Boy Long Ways From Home" - still working on finger-picking "Happy Birthday" - but it's a cool feeling to know that I should be able to one day in the not-too-distant future.
So imagine my delight when I came across, in a YouTube comment, a PDF of a songbook he published in 1970. 170+ pages of sheet music/tab notation. Gold mine! It opens with a manifesto of sorts about his approach to guitar playing and practicing. There's some wonderful stuff in there about the importance of emotionality, a few digs at "middle class guitar players" (present!) who sound like metronomes and don't really listen to what they're playing (I'm not even good enough to differentiate myself yet, but okay something to avoid), his stance against practicing scales in favor of practicing chords. That last bit really stuck with me: he said he used to practice 4-6 hours a day, focusing on chord changes until he got them absolutely perfect. And that, as he was practicing, melodic lines and combinations would come to him unbidden, as if his brain was unable not to try to make meaning out of the rote repetition. It's breathed a little life into my own practice over the last couple of days, helped me start to understand and play around with the idea of tension and resolution (hello, C11*-G7-G-F-C, you pretty sequence, you). It's pretentious and nerdy and deeply felt. "If you sit and listen to yourself," he writes, "the creative act will happen." Lovely.
Then, imagine my shock at arriving at the section of the manifesto called "Homosexual guitar playing." Wait, what? Fahey proceeds with an astoundingly misogynistic and homophobic screed about the need for a guitar player to get over their fear of the guitar, that "mastering guitar is really very similar to conquering a woman," and the failure to master the guitar is like being rejected by a woman. Let me just quote at length:
When you are alone with your guitar, you must win it if you are to be a man ... Those who fear their guitars are essentially cowardly faggots ... Homosexual guitar playing is an imitative gesture of the non-essential (i.e. temporary) characteristics of women--bitchiness, frivolity, flightiness, and super-sensitivity. These superficial characteristics are not the essence of the feminine. Look at the homosexual guitarist pick up the guitar--he is afraid to touch it. He is afraid of it. He thinks it hates him because he hates it so much. He is a Nazi... He must overcome this fear of the guitar. And he can. The guitar must be his secret love, narcotic, whatever image he prefers. But, he cannot forget to abuse it also.
Holy shit, John! Project much? The racial politics of the introduction are also a little, um, dubious, but more in the sense of being dated because the thing was written 50 years ago. He calls Black people Negroes and there's some ill-advised stuff about his mythical old blind Negro guru. But it's clear that he reveres a lot of Black players and gives effusive credit where it's due. That all seemed okay to me, all things considered. The misogyny and homophobia, though, read like they could have been posted last week on a particularly nasty men's rights subreddit.
This all prompted me to think, again, about the separation of art from artist. Fahey was a genius. And it seems he was, at least around 1970, a vicious hater of women and gay people. And he's dead. I guess where I land on it is, I still want to learn to play his version of "Poor Boy Long Ways From Home," and having a fuller picture of the person who produced it will make me think about it and hopefully play it in a different way than I would have without knowing that background. Thinking about, for example, all the poor gay boys (and girls, and trans men and women, including some I've known) who still have to flee home and it up a long ways away. It helps, frankly, that he's dead.
*My "favorite" chord at the moment, if I had to name one. I like to sit there just strumming it or, increasingly, picking it over and over.
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