James cullingham john fahey biography

Home / Celebrity Biographies / James cullingham john fahey biography

But if you look at the tradition of primitive painters and whatnot, perhaps some of it is accurate.

The last six years of Fahey’s life are this incredibly productive, creative spurt where he’s making interesting music, often electric, working with people like Glenn Jones and Cul de Sac, but also putting out these wonderful archival re-releases of people’s work.

In October 2005, the film was screened at the Calgary International Film Festival. As a record producer, Fahey revived the careers of southern American blues greats such as Skip James and Bukka White. 

As a musicologist and folklorist, Fahey's groundbreaking study of Charley Patton, first submitted as a Master's Thesis at UCLA in 1966, remains an influential study of an American Musical original. 

A complex man playing simple roots music with an extraordinary gift, John Fahey was able to take elements from the past and transport them into the future.

(Cullingham jokes that a spaghetti dinner he hosted back in the ’80s for Fahey and his then-wife, Melody, now co-head of the trust, helped get him the commission.) The resulting hour-long film, made in collaboration with the trust and Oregon Public Television, screens next week at the Leeds International Film Festival (of which MusicFilmWeb is a media partner).

MFW: When did you first encounter Fahey’s music, and in what way did it speak to you?

James Cullingham: I was reading an issue of Rolling Stone magazine at some point in the late 1960s, and there was an interview with Pete Townshend in which he said that one of his favorite guitar players was John Fahey.

This documentary chronicles the life and workof John Fahey (1939-2001), the extremely influential American guitarist, composer, author and provocateur. You’re talking about an intellectual; you’re talking about a sophisticated guitar player; you’re talking about a guy who was worldly in many, many ways. I think he felt that in order to be creative, he couldn’t be encumbered with the kind of routine material considerations, or even the structure, of what many of us would consider a well-ordered a life.

I would reject the narrative that some people, I think, are tempted to believe, that Fahey was this spectacular but self-destructive creative talent who just kind of burned out and faded away. As he indicates in the film, it wasn’t his. These informants include his former wife, the visual artist Melody Fahey, guitarists Terry Robb and Pete Townshend; Fahey’s partner in Revenant Records and friend Dean Blackwood; Grammy Award winning musicologist Rob Bowman; and the writer and author Li Robbins.

Inventive and highly cinematic video recordings from the film locations evoke the natural and urban environments that inspired Fahey’s work.

Cullingham speaks French fluently and has a working knowledge of Spanish.

In 2012-13, Cullingham is about to release In Search of Blind Joe Death

• The Saga of John Fahey. The film was recorded in the Washington DC area where Fahey was born, along the Mississippi Delta from Memphis to New Orleans, in Los Angeles, Toronto, Austin, New York and in Oregon, where Fahey spent his last two decades.