Customer Reviews

Fate Is Only Once [Vinyl]

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Some things in this world are lucky enough to age with dignity....
"Fate Is Only Once" belongs to that cathegory....One of these legendary
albums that I only dreamt of ever getting the possibility to hear...
the same as with some Rosmini and Suni McGrath things...
And here it is again....an enchanting little time-capsule that takes you
back to those days when Fahey had just recorded "Tranfiguration..." and
this type of guitar music was the least to say "obscure"...
(It is just impossible not to mention Fahey when talking about these things)
And to me this album is a reminder that I somewhere down in the seventies
had come to the conclusion that acoustic steel string playing could be easily
divided into two groups**....with Fahey as main exponent of one of groups, that
became known as "Takoma School"...and Stefan Grossman as exponent for the
other group..."Ragtime Pickers"...this perhaps being an unnecessary strict
generalisation from me....but I still hold on to that "theory" today,thirtyfive
years later!
And this album to me represents something of a "missing link" in that evoluton
of guitar music!
To try to explain what I mean: I did a little experiment and set my cd-player
in sequence track 1-3-5-7-9-11 and then I did the same for tracks 2-4-6-8-10-12.
And an amazing thing happened!
The record divided into two records!
The first being a pre-Grossman record of "ragtime-picking" music, of course very
much influenced by Rev Gary Davis....very much the same as would one decade later
appear on the "Kicking Mule" label. Perhaps a little more primitive than those
wizards that would emerge later in the "ragtime style", but considering it was
1965 it is pleasant enough...and by the way National Ragtime Stomp seems performed
on a National Steel Guitar!
The other one then appearing to be an early "Takoma"...Seemingly heavily influenced
by Fahey's approach to composition and performing.
Noteworthy are Sugar Babe, performed on 12-string and based upon Elisabeth Cotten.
Also worth mentioning are Rondo To Death and Dorian Sonata...very much in the Fahey
vein.

Taussig was included with two compositions in the "impossible to find" Takoma Guitar
Sampler from 1966 and Dorian Sonata was included in a recent guitar anthology,
Imaginational Anthem.
Otherwise nothing seems to be known of his further musical career...if he had any!

This album is a good representative from those early years when acoustic steel-string
guitar got established as an art form in itself...other than accompanying more or less
phony "folk-songs"...and as stated above I find it as an early "missing link" between
"Takoma" and "Kicking Mule"....
And considered 1965 and all that stuff; the remastering is well done so the sound
quality is surpisingly good.
Recommended for anybody who wants to dig deeper into acoustic steel-string guitar!

**Note. In fact there is also a group which can be defined as "American Raga", with
exponents such as Robbie Basho and Peter Walker...but that is another disussion to which
I maybe can come back some other day