The opening riff to "Foxey Lady" provides the foundation for the instrumental "Trash Man," and no amount of bastardization can take away from the genius guitarist his legacy. If you take this work at face value, without the baggage of what "producer" Alan Douglas did to the tapes, this time with Tony Bongiovi along for the ride, it's still Hendrix…
The title The Dance of Death and Other Plantation Favorites might lead some to believe that this is a collection of public-domain items that go back to the Deep South of the 19th century. However, while this 1964 session does contain a song titled "Dance of Death," most of the material (including that tune) was written by Fahey himself in the early '60s. So an intriguing title is simply that: an intriguing title. Nonetheless, Fahey's music does have strong southern roots. Unaccompanied, the acoustic guitarist/instrumentalist demonstrates his love of African-American blues as well as the Anglo-American country, folk, and hillbilly music of Appalachia.
Buck Owens turned Bakersfield, California into the epicenter of hip country music in the mid-'60s. All it took was a remarkable streak of number one singles that steam rolled right through Nashville with their electrified twang, forever changing the notion of what constituted country music and codifying the Bakersfield sound as hard-driving rhythms, trebly Telecasters, and lean arrangements suited for honky tonks, beer joints, and jukeboxes all across America. Half-a-century later, these remain sonic signifiers of Bakersfield, so the term no longer conveys a specific sound, place, and era, a situation the weighty Bear Family box The Bakersfield Sound: Country Music Capital of the West 1940-1974 intends to rectify.