When I thought "Time for a folk guitarist" the first name that popped into my head was John Fahey's. Then I thought, "Nah, it should be someone more authentically folk, not someone who came to the music from outside"; Fahey was a middle-class guy who discovered blues and country in his teens. But his presence was insistent. No, blues and country weren't his native language, but he took folk material and did something wonderful with it. I can't think of anything that sounds more like rural and southern America than his music. He himself referred to his style as American Primitive, and that's exactly right.

I recall seeing and hearing one of his albums when I was in college. If memory serves, someone brought it over to my apartment and we listened to it, but I think I was at least as interested in the strange text that came with it, and the general vibe: a strange mixture of musical folklore, whimsical fiction, philosophy, and religion. His first album, self-produced and distributed in 1959, was called Blind Joe Death, and that fictional bluesman appeared occasionally on other albums. There was a series of similarly-designed LPs on his own Takoma label through the early and mid-'60s, and it was one of those that I heard.

The only one of that series that I own is the one from which the following selection, its title song, is taken. The title communicates a good deal of Fahey's spirit.

Unfortunately my copy, found in a bin of used records somewhere many years after its release, does not have the accompanying text, but thanks to the Internet it can be found. Reading it will give you a better sense of the strangeness I'm talking about than anything I can say. And here is his Wikipedia entry, which will tell you about his life and career and also has links to other interesting stuff.

Here's one where you can see him playing up close.

I wish I'd bought some of those Takoma LPs in the '60s, though they were not widely available. They can still be found but sell for $30-$50 (they're available on CD at normal prices). I have a couple of others that were released on more widely-distributed labels, Vanguard and Reprise. The one on Vanguard, The Yellow Princess, is my favorite. In addition to Fahey's typical work, it contains some intriguing experiments like the sound collage "The Singing Bridge of Memphis, Tennessee."

I discovered while researching this post that sometime in the 1970s he put out an album called Fare Forward Voyagers, which is a phrase from Eliot's Four Quartets. It consists of three pieces, each of which bears a phrase from Four Quartets as its title. I'll have to