Listen to this bit of brilliance from John Fahey's hand. I think he maybe commands the deepest understanding of tuning - look at how little fretting he's doing compared to how complicated the melody sounds. John Fahey is one of those rare technical geniuses that somehow give me hope for my own guitar playing rather than underscore my own ineptitude.
Then check out how bombed he is on this PBS show. I love it when the host takes his cigarette for fear that he's just going to drop it in the guitar or snub it out on the carpet. TV was so much cooler back then. Low on the expectations, high on the raw humanity.
Finally, this is one of my favorite Fahey pieces. "America" is almost New Age, in fact, it might be responsible for the whole Windham Hill thing as an inspiration, but he plays with wide, ragged brush strokes, veering from Chinese fakery to blues to bluegrass with reckless abandon. Someone set "The Great Train Robbery" in this clip which is cute and all, but the song is the thing.
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