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''Death Chants, Breakdowns & Military Waltzes'' is a 1963 album by American fingerstyle guitarist and composer John Fahey. Various sources show either a 1963 or 1964 original release. It was Fahey's second release and the first to gain a national distributor. ==History== John Fahey’s first album was self-released on Takoma Records although the label didn’t formally exist until 1963. Fahey and ED Denson formed a partnership with record distributor Norman Pierce which led to increased sales and distribution for this and all Fahey's future releases. ''Death Chants, Break Downs & Military Waltzes'' was recorded in both Adelphi, Maryland in 1962 and Berkeley, California in 1963, the same year as Fahey's and ED Denson's "rediscovery" of delta blues guitarist and singer Bukka White. Fahey had earlier left the East Coast to attend UC Berkeley and later the graduate program at UCLA in folklore. According to Byron Coley in his article "The Persecutions and Resurrections of Blind Joe Death", "Because a local 78 dealer was also a national distributor, (Chants'' ) sold much more quickly than the first had, and it got favorable press in places like Peter Stampfel's influential column in ''Broadsides''. Stampfel recalls, 'Death Chants really blew my mind. He used a traditional guitar style to play modern-based compositions in an extended way. And his liner notes were way cool.' The press garnered by ''Death Chants'' was enough to get Fahey his first paying gig—a weeklong engagement at Boston's Odyssey Coffeehouse in the summer of '65." In his 1992 article "Reinventing the Steel" for ''Acoustic Guitar'', Dale Miller described the liner notes that Fahey began including on his releases as "hilarious yet profound and somewhat disturbing phony folklorical ramblings that spoofed the pedantic notes on many folk releases of the day." Denson agreed with this assessment and stated "Fahey mythologized his life in the liner notes," and guitarist Leo Kottke referred to both the liner notes and music together as "a whole world that he sort of chips little pieces off of. It's intact, and you get glimpses of it through him." The liner notes to ''Death Chants'' are attributed to Chester C. Petranick (Petranick was a music teacher from Fahey's youth) and carry on the myth of Blind Joe Death: :"Blind Joe never sang. He had no voice. He had been struck blind and dumb at the age of three by a local member of the NAACP, for not complying with the organization's demand to learn bar chords and diminished augmented sevenths, so that he might disassociate himself from the myth of the Negro past. Here, thanks to the intensely personal of an old man who refused to bow to the dictates of crass commercialism and political interfuge, sat John Fahey at the feet of this old man, listening and waiting for his hands to be big enough to play the surrogate kithera as did his mentor. For in Blind Joe's music, the young white boy could discern a way in which he could express the intensely personal, bitter-sweet, biting, soul-stirring volk poetry of the harsh, elemental, but above all human life of the downtrodden Takoma Park people (volk)."〔(Original liner notes. )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Death Chants, Breakdowns & Military Waltzes」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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