Love Quote by John Fahey

Fahey’s sentence wanders the way a long instrumental does: half-confession, half-discovery, refusing a clean thesis because the point is the process. “On the one hand” signals a mind in motion, catching itself mid-thought. He’s not presenting a manifesto about taste; he’s describing how devotion is built physically, through repetition, calluses, hours alone with six strings. The more he plays, the more the instrument stops being a tool and starts acting like a translator for the world.

The real turn is how love for the guitar becomes love for “virtually any kind of music” played well on it. That’s a quiet rebuke to purism. Fahey is often filed under “American primitive,” but he’s insisting that genre boundaries dissolve once you commit to craft. “Anybody” matters: it’s democratic, almost anti-curatorial. This isn’t the collector’s posture of liking the right records; it’s the musician’s humility, recognizing competence as a kind of truth regardless of style, scene, or pedigree.

Subtextually, he’s sketching an ethic of listening that comes from making. When you’ve wrestled with timing, tone, and touch, you hear the labor inside someone else’s performance. “Played well” is the key qualifier, and it’s not snobbery so much as respect for intention. Fahey’s context - steeped in blues, folk, ragtime, and outsider academia - makes this feel like a personal détente: the guitar becomes a passport out of tribal taste and into a broader, harder standard. Not “my kind of music,” but music that earns its way into your attention.