Funny thing, death. Once a set of recordings becomes the only records a musician will make, they get all different, more valuable somehow, with a new light cast upon them. We can see what will necessarily be the artist's ouevre and frame the works within the information we have (at least that of the horse's mouth variety).

Two periods of guitarist John Fahey's music are almost universally regarded as his worst, and are often considered just plain bad. His "new age" era discs - issued for the most part on Varrick and featuring his work with and inspired by Bola Sete - constitute one such era. The other, under which this release falls, is the three recordings by the John Fahey Orchestra. What typifies both is a lack of inspiration, relatively flat playing and none of the musique concrete experiments that appeared on his best records. So, no, Old Fashioned Love is not one of his best, nor even one of his better ones. It is the sort of thing that could have (but didn't, at least in the same number) appealed to the purchasers of his Christmas records, by far his biggest selling titles.

The concept behind Fahey's orchestra was to create a guitar-led Dixie band. Financing wasn't available to fully realize the project, which may have been a blessing. Only three of the eight tracks are actually with the tentet. Three others are guitar duos with Woodrow Mann and the rest are solo. It's a nice mix, although one that probably worked better when records had sides. "Jaya Shiva Shankarah" is a raga done as guitar duo, "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning" is Mississippi Fred McDowell done in dixie style and "In a Persian Market" and "The Assassination of Stephan Grossman" are two of his more enduring compositions.

There are many Fahey records that must be on the shelf before this one is acquired, including Yellow Princess, Requia and Georgia Stomps.... But Fahey was more than just a talented finger-picker. He had many and sometimes odd ideas about presenting traditional American music. Those ideas are interesting, at least in light of the whole of his work, and make Old Fashioned Love interesting in hindsight. There are plenty of out-of-print titles that should have been reissued before this one, but gaining a few good-time music fans might help to make some of his more obscure titles available again.