The master of (modern) folk guitar playing his most unrecognized masterpiece, The Voice of the Turtle, mostly because no one but John Fahey knows exactly who played each part of the album and which parts are attributable to Fahey alone. Some still believe that it really was the hoax that Fahey has said it was. Two things are for sure: “Bottleneck Blues” is a direct copy of a 20s guitar duet, and Fahey casted a large shadow on all of his previous recordings with the release of “A Raga Called Pat, Part III & IV” and “The Story of Dorothy Gooch, Part 1”.
“Bottleneck Blues” introduces the folk guitar that The Voice of the Turtle, Fahey’s folk identity and album, is rooted in as progresses from to reach a peak of meditation, spirituality, power, wisdom, exploration, and fatalism from his guitar. Moving through “the effervescent elephant eater” fiddle strokes of “Bill Cheatum”, the optimistic solemnity of flute guiding the guitar in “Lewisdale Blues”, the playful ragtime guitar duet of “Bean Vine Blues” and the older (sounding) “Bean Vine Blues #2” that are just a step from “Bottleneck Blues”.
All of these early guitar excursions, original or ripped off, prepare the listener for nothing when the summa of the album comes directly in the middle; split in half, ending the first side and beginning the second on the vinyl release, “A Raga Called Pat, Part III” and “A Raga Called Pat, Part IV” respectively have Fahey in uncharted territory with his guitar. The slap and slide intro to “Part III” has the voice of the turtle speaking his final breaths after making the final steps of a worlds-wide voyage physically, metaphysically, and ‘pataphysically. Echoes of lives past rapture into the fractured guitar melodies not merely playing a raga on an American guitar, but echoing the sounds of humanity within and without an acoustic guitar and the various accompaniment. After the chanting, Fahey digs into the melodic beginnings of his greatest works that would follow this in the early 1970s: America and Fare Forward Voyagers; “A Raga Called Pat, Part III” is merely the child wandering the garden that would become the hallowed Odysseus of the American folk blues. “Part IV” crashes in with “the Babylonian baby bonger”, dancing with “the Appalachian ape aggravator” from “Part III”.
“Train” rips out of the imaginary journeys of childhood wonderment to another hick fiddle and guitar dance for the old time saloon. “Je ne me suis reveillais matin pas en May” ventures deeper into the country with actual singing, but not in English. “The Story of Dorothy Gooch, Part 1” is a noble advancement of Fahey’s earlier death dances. “Nine Pound Hammer” is possibly a Fahey sung track impersonating his favorite blind bluesmen. “Lonesome Valley” begins to round out the album the way it started with a fiddle and guitar duet and exit bong bookending the dream for a lucid or obscured reality, or any ambiguous combination thereof.
The Voice of the Turtle was only the beginning. Yellow Princess (Vanguard, 1968) would begin removing the concrete music overdubs. America (Takoma, 1971; 1998) would have Fahey walking on charted land like no one before. Fare Forward Voyagers (Takoma, 1973) would have him walking on air as Fahey defies the limiting powers of the solo acoustic guitar and the laws of gravity to dance around and with reality as he wanted thought it could be, producing his ultimate masterpiece, and one of the handful of greatest tracks of all time in “Fare Forward Voyagers” has he, like all other Odysseus’s have done before him: returns home ragged and torn with a an epic written in the wrinkles of his face and the creaking of his joints as he dances and sings with his guitar everything he has aggregated, sifted through, and glued together through decades of dead men’s work to float and flout convention at the same time.
The Voice of the Turtle comes with a scaled down version of Fahey's original artwork and novelty stories behind the mystery of the album's creation.
The album is anywhere between a 3-5/5.
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