Kentuckian Mark Fosson grew up as a skinny kid in the 1960s. Too small to make his high school football team, he got a guitar instead. Years later, from 1971-1974, he honed his skills on the instrument while killing time in the Air Force, eventually making a demo. There was exactly one place at that time to send a vocal-less solo acoustic guitar tape: John Fahey's already legendary (and, by then, almost defunct) Takoma Records. Included in this Drag City release, The Lost Takoma Sessions, is the critique card Fahey wrote upon receipt of that demo; it reads, "Sighn Him Quick". The spelling was characteristic of Fahey, as was a more general malfeasance: By the time Fosson made it to Takoma's studios-- with a new mane of freshly permed hair and his guitar-- it was sunk into the kind of debt that had plagued Fahey his entire life. The master sold Takoma to Chrysalis, drank himself into another marriage, then handed Fosson his masters back. Fosson, his chance near-missed, handed the tapes off to his garage, where they sat for nearly 20 years.
The upside of entering the frenetic Fahey orbit is that rediscovery and rehabilitation are as fundamental to the myth as the players themselves; so when Fosson's cousin discovered Fahey for herself, in this decade, his moment was again yet to come. Tiffany Anders, the cousin, made some inquiries: "My grandmother called me an hour later and exclaimed, 'John Fahey! Shoot, I went on a date with him! We went to the Troubadour and all he said the entire night was ‘I'm scared!'" Anders tracked her cousin down, one thing led to another, and The Lost Takoma Sessions were reborn.
Clad in typeface echoing Tom Weller's work on early Fahey covers-- large, bubbly letters, equal parts psychedelic and graffiti-- Takoma Sessions is the last great record Takoma was never able to release. As a testament to how well Fosson plays, Fahey also scrawled on the tape, "best demo tape I've heard since Kottke". Where Fahey's manner was deeply steeped in blues, minor scales, and funereal syncopations, Fosson expresses far less pathos and far more, well, sunshine; rather than stomp or wail, he saves his most expressive moments for mutes, slides, harmonics-- he has a light touch, literally.
Fosson, when he plays, drones not with the bass note (as Fahey did-- it sounds like death himself knocking at your door) but with the higher end of his picking pattern. Thus the gravity in his play shifts, as he feints one way or another (one song is called "Variations on a Thumb"). It also allows him to riff more than many in the Am Priv school: "Jubilaya" sees him rip off flurries of precise and clean harmonic mutes, breaking up his flow so he can slap right back with it. Or he'll sound accents with string bends (in this, he sounds something like his now contemporary Currituck Co.) and hammer-ons, as he does on "Wind Through a Broken Glass".
Technical skill isn't all: Fosson is also a purely American-sounding player. The raga, drone, and concrete that almost inevitably make their way into solo players' repertoire are largely absent in Fosson's play. "Quarter Moon" evokes lazy, deep, Southern riverbanks and muddy sun-drenched afternoons; "Chillicothe" occurs on the same day, but later, as the light fails and the players have reported to their own porches and families. It's uniquely beautiful.
On the way, apparently, is a more recent collection of Fosson's work. Finally, after 30 years, it looks like he will again have a go at a career slinging his guitar around the country. This is good news: Lost Sessions, as lovely as it often is, also sounds like an artifact. We need more living artists on this same tip, working with the younger generation-- of which Jack Rose, the Philadelphia-based guitar player, is by far the most serious-- so that music as good as this doesn't stay stuck in past.
