Hole Notes with Dale Turner: The Unusual Tunings and Techniques of Steel-String Legend John Fahey

These videos and audio files are bonus content related to the July 2014 issue of Guitar World. For the full range of interviews, features, tabs and more, pick up the new issue on newsstands now or at the Guitar World Online Store.

As the American folk-music revival gained steam in the late Fifties and early Sixties, John Fahey stuck out like a sore thumb. He played solo steel-string acoustic guitar music that melded influences like Igor Stravinsky and Béla Bartók—composers known for dissonant, unsettling sounds—with blues artists like Charley Patton and Blind Willie Johnson.

To this, Fahey added unusual open tunings (open D minor, open G minor) and a dose of occasionally cringe-inducing humor by employing faux-musicology speak in his albums’ liner notes and mythologizing his fictional guitar inspiration, Blind Joe Death. The result was a style he dubbed American Primitivism.

Let’s examine some signature techniques and tunings culled from of the late guitarist’s earliest albums, the first of which was recently added to the United States National Recording Registry as a “culturally, historically, or aesthetically important” effort.