John Fahey’s Fretted-Fingerboard Followers
Meet five contemporary guitarists whose innovative solo work channels, evolves, and reimagines the timeless influence of John Fahey’s American Primitive style.
In recent years, a number of guitar players have emerged whose music suggests strong connections to John Fahey’s. Here are five solo artists whose work draws on, and transforms, the sounds that once inspired him.
This roundup appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal. SUBSCRIBE
Marisa Anderson
Having grown up in Sonoma listening to classical and country music, Marisa Anderson has played in country, rock, and even circus bands. She made her first solo album when she was 40, and she has a restless sound that in one moment evokes West African guitar playing, in another a Bakersfield country plucker. She has said, “I have been playing guitar for so long that there is no separation between me/the instrument/the music I make. It is all the same thing.”
Hayden Pedigo
Raised in the Texas Panhandle, Hayden Pedigo is the homeschooled son of a truck stop preacher. He believes that this absence of a rigid education helped him become fearless as a musician—there were fewer people looking over his shoulder and telling him the so-called right way to do things. His most recent album, I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away, likely wouldn’t exist without the influence of Fahey, while it is rife with his own relaxed, surreal, and cinematic style. Pedigo credits Los Angeles rap community Odd Future for showing him how to be an artist in the internet age.
Gwenifer Raymond
Call Gwenifer Raymond a master of Welsh primitive guitar: Skirting dark spaces, evoking Delta blues and druidic rites, she transplants Fahey’s fingerpicking and drones into her native Welsh soil. On her recent album, Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark, a song titled “Jack Parsons Blues” name-checks the 1940s rocket scientist from Pasadena who was a follower of Aleister Crowley (Raymond has a PhD in astrophysics).
William Tyler
Perhaps the best-known of the contemporary guitarists who wrestle with Fahey’s legacy, Nashville-based William Tyler comes from a musical family. His résumé includes seats in Lambchop and the Silver Jews, two beloved indie rock bands; backing bluegrass icon Charlie Louvin; and a duet album with Marisa Anderson. His latest, 2025’s Time Indefinite, is Tyler at his most ambitious and abstract.
Yasmin Williams
A native of Northern Virginia, Yasmin Williams was first attracted to her instrument by playing Guitar Hero II. Williams is a master of fingerstyle playing, an accomplished picker who also strums, slaps, and otherwise wrings out music with an organic, percussive understanding. A multi-instrumentalist, she plays banjo and kalimba—in addition to assorted guitars—and makes music with tap shoes. Her most recent album, Acadia, is a gently Afro-futuristic idyll.
RJ Smith is the author of Chuck Berry: An American Life. He edits for the Capital & Main website, and has written for GQ, the L.A. Times, Vogue, and Maggot Brain. His The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, was listed on the NY Times Book Review's "100 Notable Books of 2012," and his 2006 The Great Black Way won a California Book Award.
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