John Fahey was born on February 28, 1939 in Takoma Park, Maryland. His father played popular songs on the piano and Irish harp, and his mother was also a pianist. John spent his youth raising wood turtles and fishing in the Susquehawa River and upper Chesapeake Bay. On Sundays the family went to the New River Ranch in nearby Rising Sun, MD where they heard the top country and hillbilly groups of the day, like Bill Monroe and The Stanley Brothers. On a fishing trip in 1952 John met a black singer and guitarist named Frank Hovington, whose fingerpicking style so intrigued John that he bought his first guitar soon thereafter, a Sears Roebuck model that cost him $17.00, and started teaching himself to play.

After getting a B.A. in Philosophy and Religion from American University, Fahey moved to Berkeley, California, in 1963, where he established his own label, Takoma Records, and began his long recording career. The following year he moved to Los Angeles, got an M.A. in Folklore and Mythology from UCLA, and was instrumental in the rediscovery of blues artists Skip James and Bukka White. He expanded the Takoma label to include fellow guitarists Leo Kottke and Peter Lang, among many others, and New Age pioneer George Winston was another whose early career was nourished by the quirky innovator. In recent years the Takoma catalog has been purchased by Fantasy Records of Berkeley, CA, and Fahey's Takoma LPs are now being systematically reissued on CD. Fantasy Records executive Bill Belmont called Fahey “a true American musical genius.”

Although Fahey preferred to be known as an American primitivist, he was widely acknowledged as the “godfather of the New Age guitar movement,” and his recordings (over thirty albums for a wide variety of labels) showcased his ongoing musical explorations. Several were sonic explorations in the alternative music vein, and all had exotic titles. (One 19-minute excursion was called “On the Death and Disembowelment of the New Age,” while another was called “Old Girlfriends and Other Disasters.”) At the same time, he never lost his early love for traditional and roots music forms, and during the early 1990s he formed another record label, Revenant, to reissue classic recordings of early blues and old time music. At the time of his death the “stubborn genius” (in the words of Pete Seeger) was working on a new album, Summertime and Other Sultry Songs.

Fahey’s songs were featured in the films “Zabriskie Point” and “The Horse Whisperer.”