Various The Thousand Incarnations Of The Rose - American Primitive Guitar & Banjo (1963-1974)

Craft Recordings 17 tracks

The Thousand Incarnations Of The Rose American Primitive Guitar & Banjo, 1963-1974
"American Primitive" is a term originally coined to describe homegrown painters of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries who were self-taught, not trained academically. A sort of naïve charm, which includes such qualities as distorted perspective, a sometimes curious rendering of anatomy, and an unrefined use of color and modeling, characterizes their work. (Edward Hicks, whose Peaceable Kingdom paintings are well-known, is a good example of an American Primitive painter.)

So far as I can tell, the term first appears in the titles of the books, Some American Primitives (Clara Endicott Sears, 1941), American Primitive Painting (Jean Lipmann, 1942) They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the 20th Century (Sidney Janis, 1942).
But who originally applied the term to the music of John Fahey?

(And before we go any further, let us dispense, please, with "American Primitivism," which is not the same as "American Primitive." What's the difference? Well, to use another analogy from the world of painting, when Picasso, after visiting the Trocadero Museum of Ethnology in Paris in 1907, began incorporating African art iconography into his own work, he was engaged in "primitivism," that is, he was a formally trained artist borrowing from so-called primitive culture.

Fahey and company were not engaged in primitivism. Although all the players here had/have big ears and were influenced by what they listened to, they were concocting their own techniques, tunings and aesthetic approaches in order to best say what they wanted to say. They were, in the main, self-taught players—not schooled players emulating self-taught players.)