John Fahey’s first musical acts suggest an aggressive contrarian streak. In 1958, he recorded a 78 for Joe Bussard’s Fonotone label and released it under the name Blind Thomas, offering no hint that it wasn’t a pre-war recording. His first full album took the joke further: One side was credited to himself, the other to a fictional blues man called Blind Joe Death, whom he supposedly discovered in the South. Fahey sent copies to noted blues scholars and slipped them into thrift-store bins in blank sleeves where they might be “discovered” by blues fanatics like himself. It was an act of mockery aimed at the legion of earnest young folkies scouring for “authentic” artists in the early years of the folk revival. It was also, one suspects, an act of ego: Fahey was asserting his place in the canon, time and race be damned.

He needn’t have resorted to such trickery. By the mid-1960s, Fahey had become a cult figure in his own right, revered for his innovative guitar work and his reimagination of the blues. His legend has only grown since his rediscovery in the 1990s and his death in 2001.Today he is hailed as the spiritual ancestor of the noise movement (Thurston Moore and Jim O’Rourke are especially vocal fans) and various neoand freak-folkies.

“I Am the Resurrection: A Tribute to John Fahey” (Vanguard) – a compilation of covers and interpretations by the likes of Sufjan Stevens, Lee Ranaldo, Devendra Banhart, Currituck Co., Howe Gelb, Calexico, and Pelt – finds the ambitions of those who champion him reaching new heights. “It is only a short amount of time until John Fahey is recognized as the most innovative guitarist America has ever produced,” writes M. Ward, one of the executive producers and performers, in an introductory note. “He is our Django Reinhardt and William Blake wrapped in one – only better.”

Had he never played a note, Fahey would still be remembered for his con tributions to the 1960s blues revival. He grew up in Takoma Park, Md., a D.C. suburb as spiritually removed from the blues as you can get, but he fell under the music’s spell as a teenager when a friend played him a record by Blind Willie Johnson. Fahey wept.

Before long, he was going door to door, scouring the South for old blues records. His familiarity with the terrain came in handy in the early 1960s, when he rediscovered two of the most significant living blues legends: Bukka White and Skip James, both of whom would become fixtures on the festival and coffeehouse circuit. With his Takoma Records label, he championed other bluesmen like Robert Pete Williams and J.B. Smith, and launched the careers of avant-garde guitarists such as Peter Lang and Leo Kottke.

Fahey did play, of course, and it is his incomparable music on which his reputation rests. His sound is deeply steeped in the music of the past, incorporating everything from blues and ragtime to Indian ragas, and classical music; he once covered a Skip James song and a Dvorak symphony on the same album. For this he is often likened to Charles Ives and Brian Wilson, but T.S. Eliot is a more instructive comparison. Fahey, like Eliot, had little use for what was popular in his day, and it was his deep knowledge of the past that enabled him to so effectively extend and reinvent it. He quoted snatches of traditional songs all through his work as if to say, “These fragments I shore against my ruins.”

Fahey’s sound, especially on early records like “Death Chants, Breakdowns, and Military Waltzes” (which he recorded first in 1963 and again in 1967), combines the intricate, almost bouncy finger-picking style of Mississippi John Hurt and the haunting dissonance of Skip James. (Fahey claimed he only sought James out so he could learn his tunings.) He often started songs by twanging and mutating an open chord. You can hear him becoming mesmerized by it, looking for a sound that’s just beyond the expectations of his and our ear. When he found it, he fully explored its weird potential. He would alternate runs of beautiful, ever-quickening finger picking with a few discordant strums, sweeping the table clean before launching into another notion of what the song might become.

His inventiveness is most apparent where the underlying material is familiar, as on his numerous interpretations of the folk classic “John Henry.” On a 1963 version, he begins by highlighting the brightness of the melody and, simultaneously, its dark undertones. For the first two minutes it remains recognizable; then he abruptly stops and comes at it from another direction, inside and underneath. Abandoning the melody, he turns it into a ringing, roiling wall of notes. Fahey managed the same trick – turning familiar material inside out – again and again on the highly successful Christmas albums he released throughout his career.

There is, of course, something wrongheaded about having a group of lesser musicians pay tribute to an inimitable talent like Fahey by recording versions of his work. Of all those included on “I Am the Resurrection,” Peter Case (formerly of the Plimsouls) comes closest to capturing Fahey’s method and sound.

Others wisely conclude that reinvention is the better option. Full bands fare best when they can assign parts of Fahey’s playing to different instruments. Pelt does well by Fahey’s “Sunflower River Blues,” transposing the melody to banjo and the drone to (I suspect) Jack Rose on guitar. It stretches the song even further in the two directions suggested by Fahey, making it both jauntier and gloomier.

As the pied piper of the freak folk movement, Devendra Banhart is a natural choice for this tribute. His own instrumental numbers – like “Tit Smoking in the Temple of Artesan Mimicry” (an apt title in this context) – have Fahey written all over them. Unfortunately, his cover version of “Sligo River Blues” here is slow and a little dull. Songs by prominent indie rockers Grandaddy and Fruit Bats are throwaways as well. And M. Ward cops out with a reverb-y version of “Bean Vine Blues #2” that smothers the intricacies of what is already – by Fahey standards – a pretty basic song.

If he were alive to hear the album, Fahey would no doubt complain that his noise experiments aren’t better represented. When he re-emerged in the 1990s, he went so far as to disavow his early 1960s work, saying, “I consider those songs kitsch. “That the tribute focuses so much on his acoustic guitar work is a clue to how Fahey’s legend is taking shape.

The one real exception is the contribution of Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, who replicates an early Fahey noise experiment called “The Singing Bridge of Memphis, Tennessee” (from the 1969 album “The Yellow Princess”). In the original, Fahey set electronic noises and whistling against the sounds of cars passing overhead on a Memphis bridge; Ranaldo picks and strums and plays feedback over the sounds of the Brooklyn Bridge, with similarly eerie results.

In the end, the album is a document of admiration as much as influence. Many of the artists are just pledging their support for Fahey’s enshrinement. The best song in this vein is Sufjan Stevens’s cover of “Variation on Commemorative Transfiguration & Communion at Magruder Park” (a run-on title worthy of Stevens’s own “Illinoise”). He fleshes the song out with banjo, electric guitars, bass, recorders, flute, oboe, drums, and a chorus of babah-ba-bah-ing voices until it barely resembles the original. But when he sings at the end, “Let all things their creator bless / and worship him in humbleness / O praise him hallelujah,” (quoting from the hymn “All Creatures of Our God and King”) he might be referring to Fahey.