BLIND JOE DEATH’S AMERICA - GEORGE HENDERSON

A light little book after some heavier fair. I’m typically not a huge fan of guitar-centric music, though I make an exception for John Fahey. I’m not sure where I first heard of Fahey, he’s a bit obscure, and can be a bit of an acquired taste. He’s a guitar player who plays these long, solo, instrumental pieces that interpolate classic folk/blues tunes and twist and expand them into these hypnotic, sprawling, shimmering wonders. It’s really good chill-out, vibe-out, pondering music. He’s also a pretty serious blues scholar, he rediscovered several important players and records and wrote a well-received phd thesis on Charley Patton, who was deeply involved in the 60’s explosion of YT interest in the genre, tho he has a pretty antagonistic relationship with the scene. Actually, a lot of the book is about exactly this tension. As someone who loves hip-hop and listens to it all the time, I’m also constantly considering and made uncomfortable by both my own, as well as YTfolx in general’s, love and obsession with the genre. There are similar issues relating to the ways that Black pain is transmogrified into authenticity which is can itself become a source of money (often not for the artist themselves). There’s a ghoulishness, a sort of Black-death-spectacle (to quote Parker Bright) involved in both fandoms. A quote from the book reads, “they wanted access to the emotionally sincere, masculine, rebellious, darkly erotic world of the 1920’s Delta” that could easy be written today about YT fans obsessed with any number of rappers who now come complete with youtube documentaries speculating on the exact number of murders they’ve committed. Fahey is a good cypher for these issues, he wrote deeply about them. I actually didn’t know before reading this, since I’ve only listened to him online and I’ve never owned a physical record of his, that his albums are famous for their long liner notes that touch on all these issues, often satirically. Sometime he makes a point that strikes me as insane, like when he suggests there are no “political” Delta blues songs, since the music is inherently apolitical, and doesn’t consider the idea that maybe these Black men in interwar Mississippi might have maybe thought twice before committing any song like that to wax. One of the reasons the Blues is so interesting is because it is coming towards the beginning of widespread recorded music, as such, there must be so much that only existed live and that we’ll never hear. That being said, I wish there was more in this book about the actual music itself, like what themes from what songs are in which Fahey compositions, how he settled on his style, how it changed over time, which recording are the best (he has a huge discography). The book makes it clear that there are other books on these subjects more specifically, so I’m asking for something that does exist, it just isn’t this.