John Fahey Quotes

• As for fame, it can go to your head and you can become full of yourself.

  John Fahey

• As soon as the groupie finds out that you make errors in everyday life like everybody else does and that you are human, they turn on you and hate you.

  John Fahey

• Being worshipped is a horrible experience.

  John Fahey

• But I say these things in an objective dispassionate manner because, you know, and I can’t explain why, but being one of the greatest guitarists in the world simply is not very important to me.

  John Fahey

• Early Bluegrass is my favorite kind of music, not to many people know that.

  John Fahey

• From a social perspective, I am looking for friends, not acolytes.

  John Fahey

• How can I be a folk? I’m from the suburbs you know.

  John Fahey

• I had a big background in listening to classical music and I started trying to compose, like I was playing the guitar but I heard an orchestra in my head.

  John Fahey

• I just want to be treated like an average guy.

  John Fahey

• Well folks, that’s about it for the show tonight.

  John Fahey

• I also know that I am not a great technician.

  John Fahey

• I thought I’d be wasting my time to go to commercial record companies and make demos for them, because don’t forget, I was doing what I was doing and nobody understood what I was doing.

  John Fahey

• I was using them as teachers for technique but I was never trying to be a folk.

  John Fahey

• Regarding fame, fortune and Oregon I do wish I had more money.

  John Fahey

• See my father knew a lot about music, he played the piano and he would do theory and stuff like that, but I didn’t learn anything from him, but I played that for him and he liked it a lot.

  John Fahey

• So I learnt a few country western songs, I bought a chord book, and right away I started writing my own stuff, which nobody else did that, I don’t know why.

  John Fahey

• The other thing in composition is opening up the unconscious.

  John Fahey

• Well I was on the one hand, the more I played the guitar the more I began to really love the guitar and to love virtually any kind of music that anybody played well on guitar.

  John Fahey

• Well when I made my first record I thought it would be a good joke to have me on one side, have the lable say John Fahey on one side, and this guy Blind Joe Death on the other side.

  John Fahey

• When I play, I very quickly put myself into a light hypnotic trance and compose while playing, drawing directly from the emotions.

  John Fahey

John Fahey (20)

Birth:	28th February, 1939
Death:	22nd February, 2001
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Guitarist

About

John Aloysius Fahey was an American fingerstyle guitarist who played the steel-string acoustic guitar as a solo instrument. His style has been greatly influential and has been described as the foundation of American Primitive Guitar, a term borrowed from painting and referring mainly to the self-taught nature of the music and its minimalist style. He spent many of his later years in poverty and poor health, but enjoyed a minor career resurgence with a turn towards the more explicitly avant-garde, and created a series of abstract paintings during the last years of his life.

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Today's Anniversary - 24th April

Births

• 1962 - Stuart Pearce
• 1969 - Renee Zellweger
• 1942 - Barbra Streisand
• 1973 - Lee Westwood
• 1889 - Stafford Cripps

Deaths

• 1980 - Alejo Carpentier
• 2011 - Sri Sathya Sai Baba
• 1986 - Wallis Simpson
• 1993 - Oliver Tambo
• 1942 - Lucy Maud Montgomery