Death Chants, Breakdowns & Military Waltzes

Cover of the first edition

Studio album by John Fahey

Released

1963

Recorded

1962 in Adelphi, MD and 1963 in Berkeley, CA

John Fahey chronology

Blind Joe Death
(1959)

Death Chants, Breakdowns & Military Waltzes
(1963)

The Dance of Death & Other Plantation Favorites
(1964)

Alternative Cover

Cover of the 1967 stereo edition of the LP

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic
Allmusic

Death Chants, Breakdowns & Military Waltzes

Compilation album by John Fahey
Released	February 2, 1999
Recorded	1963, 1967
Genre	Folk
Length	78:35
Label	Takoma

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.

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, [Death 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:

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