Robbie Basho was a folk guitarist who is best remembered for his skills on the steel string guitar. Unlike similar contemporaries like John Fahey, Sandy Bull and Leo Kottke, Basho generally incorporated elements of Indian, or raga music into his compositions. Over the course of his career, Basho released several albums on such respected labels as Vanguard, Windham Hill and Fahey’s Takoma. On February 27, 1986, Robbie Basho died accidentally when a chiropractor’s adjustment ruptured blood vessels in his neck, causing him to die from a stroke. He was 45.
Ray Kane was one of Hawaii’s most revered slack-key guitarists. After learning to play the ukulele as a child, Kane switched over to the slack-key guitar. By the early ’60s, Kane was performing in front of amazed audiences and recording albums that would eventually total more than a dozen. In 1987, he was named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts. Kane died of respiratory failure at the age of 82.
John Fahey was an influential folk and blues guitarist who is revered for his minimalistic steel string finger-picking style of play. Fahey bought his first guitar at the age of 13, and by the time he was 20, he was making his own recordings. Besides his amazing guitar skill, what separated Fahey from most other musicians at the time, was that he started his own record label, Takoma Records through which to release while he was still just a teenager. Through all this, Fahey continued his education, eventually earning a Master’s degree in folklore from UCLA. As a musicologist, Fahey tracked down the long forgotten blues great, Bukka White whom he recorded and helped re-launch a career during the folk and blues revival of the early ’60s. And he did the same for Skip James. Fahey continued to release his own outstanding guitar-centric albums throughout the ’70s while helping to launch the careers of the likes of Leo Kottke, George Winston and Robbie Basho. In recent years, he has been noted as a direct influence by such contemporary musicians as M. Ward, Sufjan Stevens, Devendra Banhart, and Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo. Health and financial problems plagued John Fahey during his final years, and he was reportedly living out of cheap hotels until on February 22, 2001, he died following bypass surgery at the age of 61.
Trevor Lucas was an Australian folk musician and songwriter who is best remembered for the few years he spent with English folk-rock band, Fairport Convention. Lucas had made a bit a name for himself throughout the Melbourne folk clubs when he moved to England in 1965. By 1967, he was playing bass in Eclection, one of the few British bands to be signed to Elektra Records at the time. The band broke up in 1969, so Lucas lent a hand to Fairport Convention, whose lead singer at the time happened to be his girlfriend, Sandy Denny. He guested on their Unhalfbricking album. Denny left the band later that year and co-founded Fotheringay with Lucas. The band released one album in 1970 but soon broke up. In 1973, Lucas officially joined Fairport Convention and Denny soon joined him back in the band. The two married later that year and left the Fairport Convention for good in 1975. Denny died in 1978 and Lucas went on to produce albums and create film scores well into the ’80s. On February 4, 1989, he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 45.
John Martyn (Born Iain McGeachy)
September 11, 1948 – January 29, 2009
John Martyn was a Scottish folk singer-songwriter and guitarist whose career spanned the better part of four decades. With a sound that was equal parts folk, blues, jazz and rock played acoustically through a fuzzbox, Martyn was without peer in the British folk and blues scene of the ’60s and ’70s. Over the course of his career, he has played with the likes of Phil Collins, David Gilmour and Eric Clapton. John Martyn died of double pneumonia in an Ireland hospital. He was 60 years old.