Education Quote by John Fahey

Fahey’s line is a polite refusal and a quiet flex at once: he learned from folk musicians the way a painter studies anatomy, then walked away from the genre’s identity politics. “Using them as teachers” frames tradition as a toolbox, not a tribe. Technique is the point - tunings, right-hand patterns, the logic of melody and drone - not the moral posture that folk culture often demands: authenticity, lineage, belonging.

The subtext is sharper: Fahey is pushing back against the 1960s folk revival’s habit of treating music like a passport stamp. In that scene, sounding “real” could matter as much as sounding good, and reverence could harden into cosplay. Fahey admired the players (Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Willie Johnson, the whole vernacular continuum), but he didn’t want to be drafted into the revival’s storytelling about purity and roots. He’s saying: I’m not here to reenact; I’m here to invent.

That tension is central to why Fahey’s work still feels modern. He took rural blues and old-time guitar approaches and filtered them through a more solitary, even avant-garde sensibility - long forms, odd harmonies, a kind of American gothic atmosphere. The phrasing “never trying to be a folk” matters: “folk” isn’t just a style, it’s a role, a claim about who you are and who you represent. Fahey insists on being an artist first, a student always, and a brand never.