John Fahey - America

Listen to John Fahey's America and hear an honest-to-goodness pioneer of solo acoustic steel-string guitar. With a truly distinctive approach, Fahey creates dusty, sweetly evocative worlds of American folk and blues that make the soul throb. His fingerpicking on alternating and drone bass lines, coupled with chorded melodies, continues to provide inspiration to acoustic players.

America opens with the bittersweet "Jesus Is a Dying Bedmaker," a spirited folk painting of elation dressed in suffering. Fahey's halting articulation at the outset of the tune eventually gives way to an uptempo gust of glad resolve. Here and elsewhere lies Fahey's remarkable talent for squeezing a wondrous amount of expressiveness out of simple musical materials. Skip James' "Special Rider Blues" crawls along like a 12-string sloth, its call-and-response melodic lines full of languor and images of a breezeless afternoon in Mississippi. "Dvorak" is a sensitive arrangement of the third movement of Dvorak's eighth symphony, a perfect offering of classical composition with a natural folk sensibility. "Steel string wailing" spoken here.

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