"Sun Gonna Shine In My Back Door Someday Blues", by John Fahey. Dig, if you will, the title of this solo guitar piece. It is saying, Things aren't going so well at the moment, but one day in the future I am sure that they will be better. Which is a neat way of summing up the way things are at our house at the moment.
The guitar is an instrument the complexities of which I was not able to understand, or even imagine, until I had a fascinating conversation one day with my good friend Rob. Rob knows his guitars. I always thought you played a note and got a sound, and that was about it. Oh, no it isn't. Playing the acoustic guitar in particular, and especially the way John Fahey plays it, involves exponential levels of complexity, almost of a Man Against Nature magnitude. Okay, you have to be able to play the notes. Which Fahey could undoubtedly do, no matter how complicated and/or rapidfire those notes may have been. But on top of that you have the resonating effects of the body of the guitar, the resonating effects of the strings, the type of wood, the mic-ing up, the sound of the room, and who knows what else, to grapple with. There are live recordings of Fahey that sound like a man riding a precision-made billy cart down a steep hill without brakes or steering wheel, and somehow managing to wind up at the designated finishing point with an air of "all in a day's work". I would love to have seen him play. The existence of a recording entitled "Live in Tasmania" suggests the chance may have been closer than I thought.
You need to hear Fahey's playing. There is a lot of it out there. "The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick" is a particularly good live recording. It may be the one I was thinking of in the previous paragraph. It's a personal thing, obviously, but I'm not sure that the later, experimental Fahey, mucking about with electronics, electricity and the like, is actually all that rewarding. Many will disagree. Whatever. But I think it is at least arguable that all you really need is the 1996 collection "The Legend of Blind Joe Death", which combines the 1964 and 1967 "Blind Joe Death" recordings of the same set of tunes (there is supposedly a 1959 recording, too, but the provenance of Fahey's recordings, particularly for his own Takoma label, can get a bit murky), with a couple of extras thrown in for good but unnecessary measure. That is where "Sun Gonna Shine" comes from, and I am particularly feeling, today, the 1967 recording. It is a bit longer. It ups the degree of difficulty and the corresponding payoff. The recording is crisp and clear. The guitar behaves itself, even if there are moments when it threatens not to. I love it.
