I discovered the genius of Robbie Basho late in my musical explorations. He came to (minor) game alongside his fellow finger-pickers John Fahey and Leo Kottke but was forgotten for years after a premature death until a resurgence of interest in ‘American Primitive’ guitarists.

Described as the Father of American raga, he’s an astonishing acoustic fingerpicker on the steel-string guitar who described his music as “Zen Buddhist cowboy songs.” It took me a little longer to discover his ethereal and unique voice, with echoes of Tim (and Jeff) Buckley.

Orphaned and adopted as an infant in Baltimore, Daniel Robinson Jr learned to sing and play the euphonium at school, picking up the steel string acoustic guitar at pre-med college alongside fellow student John Fahey, whose studies in religion and philosophy would influence him greatly.

The young man immersed himself in Asian art and culture and moved to Berkeley, California, to continue his own studies in philosophy and music – Japanese koto, Indian raga, Persian and Native American – as well as folk, modal blues and Bartok’s piano music.

After ingesting a large dose of peyote he spent a night on a mountaintop and when he came down he changed his name to Basho, believing himself to be the reincarnation of a 15th century Japanese poet of that name. Who says the drugs don’t work?!

His finger-picked guitar technique, using unusual open tunings, was influenced heavily by his studies with the Indian sarod virtuoso Ali Akbar Khan, and the music of Ravi Shankar, playing a 12-string guitar to recreate the drone that is characteristic of Indian classical music.

He met a strange accidental death in 1986 at the age of 45 due to an accident during a visit to his chiropractor, whom he had seen regularly for a decade, when an “intentional whiplash” procedure – shifting his head back – caused an artery in his neck to rupture.