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I just finished up the last few pages of John Fahey’s How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life and—whew!—what a great book. It’s out of print through Drag City (I was lucky enough to stumble across a copy at the bookstore where I work), but if you can get your hands on it for a reasonable price, I’d highly recommend it. Fahey delivers from so many angles—curveball childhood memoirs, lobbed folk tale hallucinations, fastball sociological screeds. He tells of true love, blues singer-chasing adventures, giant fish, childhood Maryland suburb gangs and cat people (yes, cat people). He decks Michelangelo Antonioni and talks to the ghost of Hank Williams. What’s true and what’s not? Does it really matter?

Here’s an excerpt of Fahey talking about Hank Williams’ “Alone and Forsaken”:

By the fifth word you know it’s all over and you know more in those five words—and you feel more—than it takes most song writers five stanzas or more to say. That leaves him the rest of the song to tell how he feels. But as usual there is no self-awareness, no mention of the cause of the breakup. No insight into the other’s feelings and motives. These events that happen to Hank come uncaused, from out of the blue. They are complete mysteries to Hank and to us.

Life is uncannily unbearable. We’ve all been there. What’s the point in trying to figure things out? Life on earth is incomprehensible. Why bother?

And the cat people:

I had heard of but never seen any cat people. How can I explain about them? They were ordinary human beings. Perfectly ordinary. Except they were all kind of thin—ascetic starvers. But they could leap enormous distances slowly and gracefully. It looked as if once they jumped high enough they could diminish the effect of gravity and soar slowly for short distances. I just say it because it looked that way.