Steel-string guitarist Charlie Schmidt shared an era with American primitive pioneer John Fahey and absorbed his style so thoroughly that early recordings by Schmidt were attributed to Fahey by his label, reviewers, and fans alike. A Minnesota native, Schmidt picked up the guitar at six and first encountered Fahey’s music, including the landmark albums Blind Joe Death and Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes, while still in high school.
Their initial meeting occurred backstage in Minneapolis after a Fahey concert in the late 1970s. Throughout the next decade Schmidt remained a regular presence whenever Fahey performed in the Midwest, and their bond deepened following a 1992 appearance at Chicago’s Abbey Pub. There Fahey proposed an unusual collaboration: although his label Shanachie wanted a fresh recording of Death Chants, he had no desire to revisit the material himself and instead recruited Schmidt to perform the sessions as part of a long-running joke about the fictional Blind Joe Death. Schmidt delivered the tracks, yet after Shanachie dropped Fahey and Fantasy reissued the original album the tapes stayed unreleased.
Following Fahey’s death in 2001, Fantasy mined the archives and in 2004 released The Best of John Fahey, Vol. 2, mistakenly crediting three Schmidt performances to Fahey. At the time Schmidt was based in Skokie, Illinois, where he taught English as a second language. Once he resolved the authorship issue with Fahey’s publisher, he issued his debut solo album, the Fahey-inspired Xanthe Terra, on Strange Attractors Audio House in summer 2005.
