John Fahey is feared and revered around the world as a guitar player and composer. His inventions for acoustic and electric strings are the stuff of legend. Known for his finger-picking finesse, Fahey's pen has the same world-gobbling ferocity as his guitar. Fahey's collection of short stories defy classification - part memoir, part personal essay, part fiction, part manifesto. It is a collection that makes an explosive selection of his work available for public consumption. What else is there to say, except 'Grab your ankles, dear readers. It's kingdom time!'

Vampire Vultures is an unexpected gift from the late music legend John Fahey. Originally a project of his own conception, it was to be an epic work that would expand on many of the character and experiences he introduced in How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life (2000). It is a unique volume that allows the reader to walk deep into the mind of its creator. Compiled from his private papers, it includes notebook entries, short stories, letters never sent, revealing the struggles and victories of a cult icon's life in modern America.

John Fahey hovers ghostlike in the sound of almost every acoustic guitarist who came after him. He was to the solo acoustic guitar what Hendrix was to the electric: the man whom all subsequent musicians had to listen to. Fahey made more than forty albums between 1959 and his death in 2001, fusing folk, blues, and experimental composition, taking familiar American sounds and making them new. Yet Fahey’s life and art remain largely unexamined. His memoir and liner notes were largely fiction. His real story has never been told—until now. Journalist Steve Lowenthal has spent years talking with Fahey’s producers, friends, peers, wives, business partners, and many others. He describes how Fahey introduced pre-war blues to a broader public; how his independent label, Takoma, set new standards; how he battled his demons, including stage fright, alcohol, and prescription pills; how he ended up homeless and mentally unbalanced; and how, despite his troubles, he managed to found a new record label, Revenant, that won Grammys and remains critically revered. This portrait of a troubled and troubling man in a constant state of creative flux is not only a biography, but also the compelling story of a great American outcast. Steve Lowenthal started and ran the music magazine Swingset; his writing has also been published in Fader, Spin, Vice, and the Village Voice. He lives in New York City. David Fricke is a senior editor at Rolling Stone magazine.

For over sixty years, American guitarist John Fahey (1939–2001) has been a storied figure, first within the folk and blues revival of the long 1960s, later for fans of alternative music. Mythologizing himself as Blind Joe Death, Fahey crudely parodied white middle-class fascination with African American blues, including his own. In this book, George Henderson mines Fahey's parallel careers as essayist, notorious liner note stylist, musicologist, and fabulist for the first time. These vocations, inspired originally by Cold War educators' injunction to creatively express rather than suppress feelings, took utterly idiosyncratic and prescient turns. Fahey voraciously consumed ideas: in the classroom, the counterculture, the civil rights struggle, the new left; through his study of philosophy, folklore, African American blues; and through his experience with psychoanalysis and southern paternalism. From these, he produced a profoundly and unexpectedly refracted vision of America. To read Fahey is to vicariously experience devastating critical energies and self-soothing uncertainty, passions emerging from a singular location—the place where lone, white rebel sentiment must regard the rebellion of others. Henderson shows the nuance, contradictions, and sometimes brilliance of Fahey's words that, though they were never sung to a tune, accompanied his music.

Noted guitarist John Fahey presents a textual and musicological examination of the music of blues legend Charley Patton. This new edition is enhanced by Fahey's notes from the Grammy-winning, out-of-print box set Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton.

A photographic look into the world of vinyl record collectors—including Questlove—in the most intimate of environments—their record rooms. Compelling photographic essays from photographer Eilon Paz are paired with in-depth and insightful interviews to illustrate what motivates these collectors to keep digging for more records. The reader gets an up close and personal look at a variety of well-known vinyl champions, including Gilles Peterson and King Britt, as well as a glimpse into the collections of known and unknown DJs, producers, record dealers, and everyday enthusiasts. Driven by his love for vinyl records, Paz takes us on a five-year journey unearthing the very soul of the vinyl community.

Bluegrass has found an unlikely home, and avid following, in the Czech Republic. The music’s emergence in Central Europe places it within an increasingly global network of communities built around bluegrass activities. Lee Bidgood offers a fascinating study of the Czech bluegrass phenomenon that merges intimate immersion in the music with on-the-ground fieldwork informed by his life as a working musician. Drawing on his own close personal and professional interactions, Bidgood charts how Czech bluegrass put down roots and looks at its performance as a uniquely Czech musical practice. He also reflects on “Americanist” musical projects and the ways Czech musicians use them to construct personal and social identities. Bidgood sees these acts of construction as a response to the Czech Republic’s postsocialist environment but also to US cultural prominence within our global mediascape.