What exactly makes a musician fall into a genre or style? Is it the melody and the scales they use? Their influences and contempories? Or is it the totality of their sound?
I collect a lot of music but I think that anyone who has a large collection of anything can agree that organization becomes increasingly importent with the size of the collection. My books are organized by function (school/magazines/novels) and my CDs by name and date of release but my digital music is a completely different beast. Alphanumeric organization long since became an inadequate way of doing it so I moved on to sorting by genre. When deciding on where a new piece of music goes I'll listen to a few tracks and get a feel for it. Currently I have Audiobooks, Classical & Orchestrated, Comedy, Electronic,Hip-Hop/Rap, Folk/Country/Singer-Songwriter, Indie, Alternative, etc. So far it's worked well for me but I occasionally run across a piece that defies any kind of traditional classifying. I had a lot of trouble deciding where Beck should go, for example. I finally threw him in with the Folk/Singer-Songwriter guys because there's just something that I can't quite explain about his work that makes me think that he belongs with Folk singers.
Some of you may be familiar with John Fahey. Typically he's considered a Folk guitarist and considering the time he worked in, the early 60s onward, it's hard to consider another definition that both makes sense and gives the full impression of what the sound is. Generally folk is seen as being by people, for people. The music down in the streets and in the bars and kitchens and wherever else people gather to celebrate themselves and their history. It usually makes one think of a certain elegant simpleness. The problem with this definition is that it has mutated over the years to incorporate a certain type of virtuosity of the simple; songs that sound simple or follow simple progressions yet are complex and textured. Fahey is certainly an artist who styled his songs around folk country and blues music but in my experience stating any one of these as the dominant makes you immediately notice the elements of the other all the more.
I've been listening to Fahey for a few months now and I'm still no closer to objectively fitting him in anywhere. AllMusic Guide have an excellent quote that tells my dilemma. "His music was so eclectic that it's arguable whether he should be defined as a "folk" artist. In a career that saw him issue several dozen albums, he drew from blues, Native American music, Indian ragas, experimental dissonance, and pop. His good friend Dr. Demento has noted that Fahey "was the first to demonstrate that the finger-picking techniques of traditional country and blues steel-string guitar could be used to express a world of non-traditional musical ideas -- harmonies and melodies you'd associate with Bartok, Charles Ives, or maybe the music of India.""
His first several albums especially have this unclassifiable element that brings me back again and again in awe and wonderment at how impossible it is to explain what's so wonderful about it.
And by accounts he was a
sarcastic old curmudgeon.
For instance, there was the time he was playing at the Berkeley Folk Festival and decided to tweak the crowd. "I was trying to convince the audience, who was mostly Negros, that these jerks like Phil Ochs and the impartial moderator Pete Seeger, were writing music about Negros to make money and not to help Negros. That they were actually exploiters. And I got booed by the Negros. I kept saying, 'I think that Negros have enough intelligence to write their own songs. I'm really convinced of it.' BOO! I was set up, I just didn't know it. I was percieved by the left as being dangerous. Because I was playing at the Jabberwock every weekend and packing it. And I was playing an Al Capp role, calling them communists and using the word 'nigger' and things, just to see if they really had any backbone. Nobody ever said a word. Somehow the left found out about this and thought it was much more important than it was. It wasn't really very important, it was just sort of fun. I remember when you'd go into a folk store, there'd always be a big sign up, 'Should Pete Seeger Go To Jail?' I'd always say, 'Absolutely. Because he sings such lousy music.'"
So here's a few tracks.
I Am the Resurrection Sunflower River Blues with added lyrics by Buck 65 (You have no idea how happy I was when I found this)
The Portland Cement Factory at Monolith, CAWhen the Catfish is in Bloom (as covered by Peter Case since the one recording of it I have by Fahey has screwed up channels)
