By the time he'd recorded his sixth collection of "American Primitive" guitar instrumentals in 1967, John Fahey was in command of an impressively original vocabulary, based on old blues tunes, country songs, Episcopal hymns, early American pop music, and smatterings of jazz, classical, Indian music, electronic experimentation, and anything else that seemed to fit. He had also evolved a world view which seemed to somehow parody the countercultural icons and values of the Seventies and Eighties long before they were ever in place. At times, Fahey's folk roots seemed an ambiguous takeoff point for his experiments, but that ambiguity is at the heart of Fahey's appeal. Rarely did he combine his mastery of traditional fingerpicking guitar styles and his bent for experimentation as convincingly as he did on Days Have Gone By.