Revolt of the ILX Brigade: New Post-Fahey Folk For PPL that post in the Takoma & Tompkin's Square Threads

Digging both of these songs. Thanks!

yeah, so good.
listening to this danny paul grody dude this morning, who we may have talked about upthread? - http://dannypaulgrody.bandcamp.com/
he's on the last imaginational anthem comp, maybe more in a soundtrack-y/ambient/almost new age vein, but very very good. apparently has a new thing coming out on three lobed this summer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnYWvsME-1U

gonna just post occasional old-timey videos in this thread, try to keep it more guitar and songster oriented than fiddlin

i may have posted this on ilx somewhere before but it;s a huge fave--
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4sIv_qQ314

Also great, but with a name like "Jimbo Jambo Land" it pretty much has to be. Enjoyed the Rabbit Brown as well, keep em coming!

That Danny Paul Grody is really nice. I am a fan of minimal guitar stylings, and it is just a really well-textured set of songs. Nothing too showy at all, but I also didn't find it too new-agey, pretty good balance of stuff to hang onto (i.e., movement and melody) and drones/layers to my ears. Think he is on tour with Chuck Johnson, also mentioned upthread.

danny paul grody is really hitting the spot right now, need soothing stuff w/how crazy this week has been in the world

also perhaps it's a testament to fahey himself that this thread can contain stuff ranging from jimbo jambo land to danny paul grody and it still makes *sense*

lol at this from the lumineers thread
really tempted to start trolling Revolt of the ILX Brigade: New Post-Fahey Folk For PPL that post in the Takoma & Tompkin's Square Threads in the LOL FOLK MUSIC style of this thread

― some dude, Friday, April 19, 2013 10:11 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha classic some dude

Yeah, this thread is a real winner in that sense in re the range of the stuff that "makes sense". I would think the Fahey would have liked, or at least not actively hated, most of the stuff here.

Oops, bad timing there.

idk, fahey hated a lot of stuff

from what i've read & what peter told me fahey was really anti-Folk Music (TM) anyway right?

he told glenn jones that "fingerpicking is a disease."

Yeah, I guess I shouldn't underestimate Fahey's level of disdain for most music ....

he told glenn jones that "fingerpicking is a disease."

― tylerw, Friday, April 19, 2013 5:38 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

&vtorch of the mystics deemed kitsch

haha for a second i was like "fahey dissed the flaming lips??"

hey I have a bit of a historical question that I assume you lot will know - as far as I can tell Fahey and Davy Graham were the Newton and Leibniz of solo guitar, coming up with it independently at around the same time, right? But I've found it kind of odd that there doesn't seem to be a great deal of overlap in the post-Fahey and post-Graham traditions, maybe only emerging more recently where the audience for them both has changed a lot. Am I missing the early connections somewhere? (And in a more musicological sense - Fahey-style and Graham-style mostly sound v different to me but I don't have the ear to really discern what it is that's different between them, is there a neat way of summarising it?)

I guess I put it down to the source material each worked from, difference between scots/anglo folk and country/folk/blues? (obv lots of crossover there)

Picked up the Imaginational Anthem 6: Roots of American Primitive Guitar

Everyone who cares enough to post in this thread should def hear this

Graham was heavy into jazz too not sure if fahey was but don't get much of a jazz vibe from his stuff

yeah the jazz thing is heavy with graham and his followers -- don't think fahey cared for much jazz past dixieland (or at least didn't incorporate anything past that into his playing). graham/jansch/renbourn etc. were huge mingus fans.
but yeah i have been sort of interested in the UK strain of this stuff, too -- there's a dude c joynes who is kind of bridging the gap between the takoma thing and the more English/Scottish/Irish folk sound. http://www.boweavilrecordings.com/joynes.html

yeah the jazziness of Graham (especially rhythmically, I think) seems one of the clearer divisions, I suppose the bit I struggle to unravel precisely is where Graham's lean towards British folk and Fahey's lean towards American folk becomes clearest, especially since Graham doesn't shy away from blues either.

https://soundcloud.com/tompkinssquare/guitar-rag-by-sylester-weaver this track from Imaginational Anthem 6 is great, definitely have to check out the full thing.

the american fiddle repertoire is deep rooted in scottish, irish & english fiddle traditions; likewise, the melodies of these tunes incorporated themselves into the body of american folk song. in turn you get guy's like fahey who will straight up play an arrangement of an irish folk melody like "lord of all hopefulness" on 'yes jesus loves me.' similarly you get "st. patrick's hymn" at the end of 'transfiguration.'

i thought there was a website that listed the varying names for tunes based on geography, but i cannot find it now.

Is that Imaginational Anthem Vol 6 a record-store day only thing? Rats.

it'll be out for real next month -- i think the limited double LP gatefold thing is the "record store day" part of it. but i think you should be able to get it on vinyl/CD/whatever next month in some form.

and yeah it is totally great from start to finish.

sylvester weaver is awesome, love his duos w/ walter beasley too. had no idea there had been so many imaginational anthems, I only have the first one - what's best?

This imaginational anthems reminds me a bit of when college fugazi fan me heard gang of four for the first time

Think on the Andy Beta memoir I posted upthread, he mentions Fahey discoursing on electric Miles (he approved, apparently)? Seems like there's a similar vibe--intimate voice in space--at times: somewhat Milesian, if not precisely jazzy--but electric Miles emphasized in some interviews that he also was then using jazz as *one* component--maybe the basic one--but still, it was in there w blues, rock, Eastern, etc. I've also read that Fahey said he had no use for the blues very early on; maybe his initial explorations of UK-by-way-of-Appalachia might share some qualities with early 60s Brit folk guitarisms--?

of course it wouldn't really be Uk-by-way-of-Appalachia, but American mountain music w strong resemblance to UK antecedents--did he record anything before he got into the blues?

a lot of fahey's earliest recordings, as issued on the fonotone box, are straight blues pastiches.

fahey was in his mid-teens when he had his damascene experience sobbing down the phone to dick spottswood after he made him replay blind willie johnson's praise god i'm satisfied. the story is mb a bit cute, w/ this "& that's when the scales fell from my eyes & i realized racism was wrong" subtext, but it was definitely a pivotal moment.

also fahey & graham were popularizers, taking solo guitar seriously, but they both drew on traditions that had loads of primarily instrumental guitar already, & saying they invented it is ridiculous

Um wow this spoken word intro on one of the new imaginational anthem

of course, ogmor, i didn't mean to suggest otherwise, my curiosity was mostly around the fact that there's the simultaneous birth of these kind of multicultural hybrid genres of solo guitar, playing but despite that musical pluralism there didn't really seem to be, as far as i'm aware, a great deal of crossover between the scenes.

I'm not to up on 78s & stuff I guess casual racism is probably pretty common

well, that's true, but they were both pretty small scenes really & it took them a while to make it across the atlantic. i am not a fan of the british stuff really, & there are plenty of other acoustic traditions going on in parallel - can ali farka toure be leibniz?

Fahey was big on bola sete

bola sete, gliere, barbecue bob, paul tillich... all the greats

I don't know bbq bob but with a name like that I'm sold already

bbq bob ain't bad, but he's far from my favorite georgia bluesman. that would have to be willie mctell, i think. blind blake was a georgian too, and sylvester weaver.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgmM9CxwgNo

I was going to link to the famous vrootz compilation of fahey's influences as some of you guys don't seem familiar w/ some of that stuff, but all links are dead. so, w/ nothing better to do w/ my sunday, I put together a spotify playlist. there are a few omissions but spotify has nearly everything. it's a really beguiling mix of bluegrass, big band jazz, country blues, high romantic russian symphonies, ragtime, fahey's beloved christmas music, mountain banjo, hawaiian guitar, gamelan, hillbilly music, samba &c. have a listen! http://open.spotify.com/user/ogmor/playlist/0RiAX0TJbinxXYOtai81wk

wow thanks ogmor! weirdly as obsessed as i've been w/fahey for the last year i don't know that much abt him. i should read his book.

interesting that prokofiev is on there, i'm reading a history of Folkways records (moses asch) and apparently woody guthrie was a huge fan as well.

definitely read "bluegrass music destroyed my life" it's a great read, both for the weird semi-autobiographical/therapeutic writings as well as his recollections of musicians. good stuff.

yeah that fahey roots mix is great, i've had it for a while, but i'm still absorbing it. i've only read bits and pieces of fahey's books, but i should just buy 'em...

The Fahey books are great, "How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life" especially. Some real gold in there, whether you even like his music or not.

i leant fahey books out and i doubt i'll ever get them back :\

Bummer man, I hate when that happens. Shitty.

agree w/ everyone else re: "how bluegrass music destroyed my life", also enjoy this: http://johnfahey.com/reality.htm