I got this as a present last Christmas, off my Amazon wishlist. It may have been on the list for a year or two, but it came at the right time. For, although The Wire had been going on about Fahey for years, the little I had heard of his music had left me nonplussed. As in, what's so special about that, then.
It wasn't until I saw James Blackshaw at last year's Green Man Festival that the penny really dropped — that people were making folk music that could have as much in common with Indian classical music or 1970s spiritual jazz as with any regional tradition of folk culture; and that in doing so they drew attention to the common thread running through all these musics. It's as though Fahey started in the same place as Dylan with all those Harry Smith recordings, but took a different fork in the road.
So I listened to this CD with new ears. Still not that attentively, apparently, since it was only this time around that I noticed that nine of the tracks appear twice each in different versions. This led me to the sleevenotes, which explain that Fahey recorded the album three times between 1959 and 1967, and these are the second and third versions.
As you can tell, I haven't properly absorbed the context, history and mythology around Fahey. That's for another time. For now, I just enjoy the pure sound of the later version of Uncloudy Day.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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