Guitarist reminds how deep roots run in Kentucky town
Here’s a backdoor way of finding out about an artist whose music ends up enveloping you for years: I did a simple Wikipedia search on my hometown of Ashland, Ky., a town of around 21,000, though the tri-state region there tips closer to 300,000. So it’s big, and it’s also small.
The region drew attention a few years ago because of a county clerk who refused to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple, which is what prompted my low-grade research. I figured she could be carved into a dubious road-cut Rushmore with others from the area: Lynndie England (a one-hit wonder with Abu Ghraib) and Charles Manson. I’ve actually found no evidence that the “Manson house” near a public golf course near my home was anything other than urban myth, but he did hail from the region.
Who else did Ashland produce? I knew most of them: The Judds, Chuck Woolery, Billy Ray Cyrus (technically Flatwoods, but parts of the region blur together). Umpire Charlie Reliford and pitchers Brandon Webb and Don Robinson, I knew about them. NPR’s Noah Adams, I knew of. Also a whole crop of musicians who grew up along the “Country Music Highway,” U.S. 23, which gave us Keith Whitley, Ricky Skaggs, and if you drove farther south, Loretta Lynn and Dwight Yoakam.
Also on the Wikipedia page was a musician named Mark Fosson. Having written about music for 25 years, my curiosity was piqued because I’d never heard of the guy. Not, “Oh, I know the name, but can’t tell you much about him.” I’d never heard the name Mark Fosson, though I spent years as a classmate to a Fosson.
One additional click opened a door wide. Fosson, it turns out, had taken a circuitous route through music that made a prominent stop at Takoma, the label run by John Fahey, an obscure but beloved cult figure in popular music, who has proven to be a hugely influential guitarist over the past five-plus decades. (He ranked No. 78 on Rolling Stone’s greatest guitarists of all-time list.)
I’ll always welcome a new songbird in my yard. And Fosson fit the bill.
Sadly, he died Friday of cancer. In the three years I got to know his work, it proved tirelessly interesting. His approach to playing guitar was interesting: He avoided updating bluesy drones, territory Fahey claimed in the early 1960s, with generations of acolytes following him. Fosson played with a more sprightly tone. Fahey worked dark corners, Fosson took springtime walks outside.
When I finally managed to set a time to talk to Fosson, in July 2017, he seemed in his element. I asked how he was and he replied simply, “I’m pretty good, man. Just sitting on my back porch listening to the rain.”
He’d just released “Solo Guitar,” an album much more imaginative than its title. Fosson didn’t leave a lot of recorded music behind: five albums, as far as I can tell, that span more than 40 years, as well as a handful with a band called the Bum Steers.
Fosson was friendly though not excessively talkative — he was more interested in my experience growing up in Ashland than sharing his. But talking to him, I recognized a similar pattern in growing up in a town, and wanting to leave, then looking back on it years later with some greater appreciation.
The interview never ran, as other stories got in the way. So here’s a small part of his story, which overlaps some with my own.
As a kid in Ashland, Fosson remembers his entire family being keen on music.
“My dad had a couple of beer joints, and when they’d change out the 45s he’d buy the ones they were taking out,” he said.
According to Fosson, one of the beer joints served up 45s he described as “a lot of hillbilly stuff, some Hank Locklin and Bill Monroe. Some Merle Travis records, too.”
He also bought singles from a guy named Tink, who worked at a juke joint with an African-American customer base.
So Fosson grew up flooded in music.
Because he was born in 1950, Fosson’s adolescence was timed perfectly for the Beatles. He recalled his father bringing home a 45 with an instrumental of a Beatles song.
“I think I was probably the first kid in Ashland to have a Beatles record,” he said. “There was a lot of, ‘What is this stuff ?’ ”
The late folk legend Jean Ritchie — who hailed from the excellently named Viper, Ky. — would play in his grade school, appearances that Fosson said were largely lost on him and his classmates.
“I guess it was pretty cool stuff,” he said. “But we didn’t really know who she was. Once I grew up, it dawned on me how cool it was.”
I don’t know why I was surprised to hear Fosson used to see shows at Camden Park in Huntington, W.Va. The amusement park has been there since the advent of the wheel. He saw Patsy Cline, Marty Robbins and Hawkshaw Hawkins there in the early ’60s. I remember seeing some permutation of the Beach Boys there in the early ’80s. On an Ashland scoreboard, he won that round.
Fosson thought he was about 14 or 15 when he saw the Stanley Brothers at the Paramount Arts Center, the city’s historic theater. If you’ve seen Billy Ray Cyrus’ “Achy Breaky Heart” video, you’ve seen the Paramount Arts Center.
Carter Stanley’s playing grabbed his attention. “The strings on his guitar looked like telephone wires,” Fosson said. “They were so thick, and required so much effort to play. The sweat was pouring off his head. From where I was sitting, it looked like sparks were flying off the strings. I remember thinking it wasn’t just entertainment. I thought, ‘This is serious.’ ”
In high school, Fosson fooled around a little with some rock ’n’ roll bands, but nothing too serious. After high school, Fosson joined the Air Force rather than be drafted. At some point while in the service he first heard Fahey. He bought a Yamaha 12string guitar and left rock ’n’ roll behind.
After leaving the Air Force, Fosson hoped to use the GI school to study to become a luthier, as he had acquired some experience repairing guitars. His request was not approved.
“Art school was not approved,” he said. “I asked what I was approved for. They said I could be a mechanic or something else. ‘Well, I don’t want to do that.’ Of course, that might’ve come in handy at some point. But I was set on music, and it felt like the Dark Ages.”
He gigged some around Ashland and in southern Ohio, and cut a demo. He mailed it to Takoma’s offices in California. Fahey listened and scribbled some notes: “Best demo tape I’ve heard since Kottke,” he wrote referring to the guitar great Leo Kottke. “Talent, Good Excellent.” “5 stars, this guy has TALENT.”
And, most importantly, “Sign him quick.”
In 1977, Fosson packed up and left Kentucky for California. But Fosson’s big break came with a few catches. Among them were some superficial hang-ups: “One of the first things he told me was to get a haircut,” Fosson said. “He really didn’t like hippies.”
Fahey was a musical visionary, but like many musical visionaries, he was also an utterly inept businessman. Takoma always teetered along bankruptcy, and Fosson’s timing was terrible. So the recording he made for Fahey ended up in a closet until 2006 when the Chicago label Drag City released “The Lost Tacoma Sessions,” which included some background in the liner notes courtesy of Allison Anders, a filmmaker and another prominent native of Ashland. She and Fosson were also cousins.
Despite the setback with Tacoma, Fosson stayed put. “I liked it out there,” he said. “The beach, the mountains. I used to love the desert. I didn’t see any reason to leave.”
Fosson joined a country rock band, the Bum Steers, in the late-’80s and made a pair of records with them. But “The Lost Tacoma Sessions” became the first proper release with his name on it, a recording that drew some long-deserved notice, particularly among those who craved instrumental acoustic guitar recordings. In 2012, the label Tompkins Square released “Digging in the Dust: Home Recordings 1976,” which served as Fosson’s origin story.
And the little renown he found afforded him the opportunity to make a few new recordings: “Jesus on a Greyhound” in 2007 and “kY” in 2015. Last year, he told me he had nearly completed work on a new vocal record.
Fosson’s output is so scarce that the recordings that are available feel like little gifts. They played in my mind throughout a recent visit back home, my first in over a decade.
Cyrus’ mullet may have been a punchline in the ’90s, but today I admire the guy’s resilience and reinvention in a difficult industry. The Judds felt flaky for a time, cashing in on an endless farewell tour. But the recent Cocaine and Rhinestones podcast renewed my appreciation of the ageless harmonies that they produced.
Fosson’s recordings had a similar revelatory effect on me. Just when you think you know a place, what it was, you find some street you hadn’t ever driven, some magical corner tucked away with a little story that you missed.