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This version of "Dance of Death" was recorded on Halloween of 2013.
What you are listening to here is based on the 1964 recording issued on the original LP The Dance of Death & Other Plantation Favorites. An earlier version was recorded in February of 1962 but remains unissued. A second recording exists from the late 80s. "Dance of Death" is unique in Fahey's repertoire being in a G minor tuning ("Impressions of Susan," another one of my favorites, shares this same tuning). This is not fully realized until several minutes in, after an extended intro in G major. "Dance of Death" makes it's way through several themes, including a quote from Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. Fahey uses this same quoted melody in later versions of "When the Springtime Comes Again" as well.

The guitar I'm playing here is an especially spectacular 17 inch rosewood Euphonon built by the Larson brothers in 1939, coincidentally, the year of Fahey's birth.

From the liner notes of the 1964 LP:

THE DANCE OF DEATH is a European peasant song sung before lighting the bonfires on many a pestilent occasion. quite naturally no recordings survive of the original 12th century performances but they live on in the folk traditions of Takoma park and in the Etruscan River Valley Basin Delta Region. Joe Death heard the old massa gently strum this piece on an old baby's coffin while watching the mansion burn in 1865. Moved, the youth subtly shifted the rhythm to a more Afrocentric style and using the folk process, which he had learned from his father, he changed the dirge into a dance. Many in Takoma park recall the old darky shuffling his feet and humming the only surviving song from the white slave tradition. The white slaves in America after their liberation by the victorious Bessarabian armies migrated to New York and Berkeley, and their descendants, yet living in their quaint shanties, are known as White Negroes or "hippies". The failure of American society to integrate these people into national life can only have serious consequences in the future, and this piece is included in the hopes of increasing intercultural understanding and friendship of all people.

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