John Fahey

The guitarist John Fahey, who has died in hospital after a heart bypass operation aged 61, was a rebellious spirit who pioneered a new strain in American music. Fahey's explorations and inventions, initially animated by the blues but eventually drawing upon other vernacular forms, inspired many of the guitarists involved in "new age" music, although some of his last playing was alongside spiky rock bands less than half his age.

He was born in rural Maryland, where as a boy he fished and raised turtles, creatures with which he felt a special bond: they recur in the titles and artwork of his early albums. His parents were musicians, and the family often visited the New River Ranch country music park in Rising Sun, Maryland, where Fahey heard bluegrass and country stars.

The music marked him permanently - years later he would publish an essay collection, How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life - and his direction in life was further determined by meeting Frank Hovington, a black singer and guitarist whose delicate fingerpicking led him to take up guitar himself.

Falling in with the collectors Joe Bussard and Dick Spottswood and joining them in record-hunting trips through the suburbs of Washington DC, Fahey encountered the African-American blues and gospel artists of the 1920s and 30s. His first hearing of the singer and slide-guitarist Blind Willie Johnson, he said, made him physically sick; the second time, he was "smote to the ground by a bolt of lightning".

He made a number of recordings for Bussard's private label Fonotone, some under the pseudonym Blind Thomas, then embarked on what may have been a full-blown hoax, recording an album of blues and blues-like tunes in the persona Blind Joe Death. On moving to Berkeley in 1963 he and a friend, Ed Denson, created the Takoma label to issue The Transfiguration Of Blind Joe Death - which has been called the most famous obscure album of recent times - and other collections of Fahey's instrumentals, in which blues tonalities cohabit with an almost Buddhist meditativeness.

In 1964, he was one of the first graduates of the University of California at Los Angeles's new folklore course; his MA thesis on the blues musician Charlie Patton, when published in 1971, was the first monograph on a country blues artist. He was also part of the group of collector- researchers who located, and briefly revived the careers of, the bluesmen Skip James and Booker White.

Takoma Records became a home for guitarists with similar interests, such as Leo Kottke and George Winston, while Fahey himself was taken up by larger labels such as Vanguard and Reprise, his recordings uniting with those of Kottke, William Ackerman, Robbie Basho and others to form the gene pool of new age guitar music.

Fahey suffered from erratic health and alcoholism, and for a period in the 1980s and early 90s seemed to have disappeared. Journalists tracked him down in Oregon, where he was washing dishes in shelters for the homeless. When he recommenced playing in public, it was not in his old idiom, but closer to the distorted electric-guitar music of bands like Sonic Youth, although his last tapes include tunes by Irving Berlin and George Gershwin.

To many of those who met him, Fahey seemed brusque and odd. The journalist Eddie Dean described him as "contentious, cantankerous ... exile and alienation [were] what he identified with in his heroes, loners such as Patton, restless revenants".

Appropriately, one of his last projects was to create, with record-collector Dean Blackwood, another label dedicated to obscure American vernacular music and call it Revenant.

John Fahey, guitarist, born February 28 1939; died February 21 2001

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