Contagious Enthusiasm
Talking with Arhoolie Records' Chris Strachwitz

It's easy to get caught up with the contagious enthusiasm of Chris Strachwitz, founder and president of Arhoolie Records. He's an affable, ebullient man in his mid-60s who has immersed himself in music that is as full of vitality as he is. Near the conclusion of a 60-minute phone conversation, the mere thought of Los Cenzontles, a Mexican- American youth group based at a neighborhood center near Arhoolie's home of El Cerrito, California, caused Strachwitz to break into song, singing the words to the first track on Los Cenzontles' new Arhoolie album Con Su Permiso, Señores (CD 435). He then proceeded with what best can be described as a stream of consciousness rave about "these young girls... love to sing in a kind of different style and it's usually four of them singing together... [or] duet... a wonderful record with all different accompaniment... it's just a haunting sound and then there's the banda sound on some of it and we have Santiago Jimenez, Jr. [on accordion]... And it sounds fantastic!"

Mance Lipscomb (photo: Chris Strachwitz)

Currently-active artists making the music of their cultural or ethnic background provide just a portion of the Arhoolie catalog: the label also releases compilations of roots recordings originating from the 1900s to 1950s, as well as CD reissues of material Strachwitz recorded himself after forming Arhoolie in 1960. The strange-sounding name of this small, eclectic label is derived from a term that refers to a cornfield holler.

Strachwitz was born in 1931 in the region of Silesia, which was then part of Germany and now part of Poland. He and his family moved to the U.S. in 1947 and they settled in California. Strachwitz became a serious fan of roots music after hearing hillbilly, blues, and ethnic songs on the radio. He started collecting records in the days 78 rpm records were being displaced by 45s. "I would buy 78s cheap in those days," said Strachwitz. "This was in the mid-50s and I would go to jukebox operators in San Francisco and they would charge me a quarter for about a hundred of them."

As an adolescent, Strachwitz became fascinated by the recording process. He bought a small disc recorder with a microphone and a turntable with a cutter to cut an acetate. His first recording was a brief tirade by his Latin teacher. He gradually bought more equipment and learned more about the recording process from Bob Geddens, a legend of R& B recording. Strachwitz did a little recording in the Bay Area, but his dream was to record bluesman Lightning Hopkins. Problem was, he had no idea where Hopkins lived. Strachwitz' friend, musicologist Sam Charters, located Hopkins in Houston in 1958, which Strachwitz now says "was like the opening of the pearly gates."

Strachwitz met his blues hero the next year and, by the summer of 1960, finally made the trek to Texas to record the blues. His equipment was far from the best — a temperamental Roberts tape recorder — but the Arhoolie-meister's tale of his initial Texas recording adventure becomes as much a detective story as anything else.

"When I finally went on my first trip in 1960, I literally stopped on the streets of Fort Worth and saw some black guys playing dice," he recalled. "Paul Oliver [British blues aficionado and author] had sent me a long list of artists that supposedly recorded at Fort Worth/Dallas in the past. I had that list with me and was going to meet up with Paul later on the trip. I just got out of the car and asked these guys if they ever heard of guy named Little Brother. I had a 78 by Little Brother who came from that area. They all looked at me and said, 'Man, what d'you want with him?' I said, 'I like his old records and he's a really wonderful blues guy.' Finally one of them came over to me and said, 'He hangs around with Black Ace.' The name Black Ace didn't mean anything to me except he was on Oliver's list. [Ace was] a man who had recorded in the 30s. So I asked the man 'Where can I find Black Ace?' He said, 'Well, he comes into this tavern every night at 5 pm, you can't miss him because he's got Ace written on his white shirt over his pocket.' I went to the bar at 5 pm and there comes a black man with a white shirt with Ace written on it. I said, 'You must be Black Ace.' And he said, 'Yes sir, it's me.' And that's how we met Black Ace. So I had my nerves encouraged by that," noted Strachwitz.

He continued on to Houston and discovered that he had missed Hopkins, who had just gone to California. But Strachwitz' traveling companion Mack McCormick, who was trying to be Lightning's agent at that time, suggested they'd find more blues singers in the countryside. Strachwitz recalled "We drove out towards Washington County. Again, I literally just got out of the car and I saw people working in the fields and asked them, 'Have you heard of any songsters or guitar pickers out here?' They said, 'You better go to Navasota for that.'"

Strachwitz picks up the story in Navasota. "McCormick recalled a Hopkins song 'Tim Moore's Farm,' a powerful protest song with lyrics: 'ain't but the one thing this black man done wrong/I moved my wife and family down to Mr. Tim [in reality, Tom] Moore's farm.' McCormick had a feeling that Tom Moore might have a plantation in the area because he knew Lightning was from that part of the country, and thought the best place to start inquiring would be the feed store," Strachwitz continued. "We walked into the feed store and Mack just walked up to the employees and said, 'Does Tom Moore live here in town?' And that's how we met Tom Moore. We asked him who the musicians were that played for his hands. I just became a detective. That's how we found most of them."

One of those musicians was a guitarist named Mance Lipscomb. Some of the results from that detective work in 1960 were the LP Mance Lipscomb: Texas Sharecropper and Songster, which became the first album on Arhoolie (reissued on CD 306, Texas Songster), and a set by Black Ace (now on CD 374, I'm the Boss Card in Your Hand).

Throughout the 1960s, Strachwitz recorded more blues (including Fred McDowell and ultimately Hopkins), Cajun, and zydeco artists, and was able to make enough to eke out a living after he left his job as a teacher in the early 60s. His first real money came via music publishing deals. Strachwitz said he learned about "this publishing racket... slowly by hit and miss... I learned... from Eddie Shuler [of Goldband Records] in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He's the one who first really taught me what was involved." Strachwitz published the songs of Country Joe and the Fish in the late 60s, including the Woodstock anthem-to-be "I Feel Like I'm Fixing to Die Rag." He recorded a tape of the band, and when they asked what they owed him, Strachwitz wanted only to be the songs' publisher. They agreed.

Strachwitz also published some Fred McDowell compilations, one of which was covered by the Rolling Stones and provided the aging McDowell with royalty money. I then asked Strachwitz how he was able to get the trust of the blues musicians, when so many received no royalty money for their compositions.

He prefaced his remarks by saying that initially he was unable to record artists who had previously recorded professionally, like Hopkins and Lil' Son Jackson, because "They asked for a fairly stiff fee which I couldn't afford. Lightning and Lil' Son both wanted $100 a side [i.e., per song], because that's what they were paid by most of the record companies. But I didn't have that kind of money and I guess I got their trust by being such a fanatic. I think that's how I must have won the trust of a lot of Mexican musicians later on, I was such a fanatic [about their music]. Those standards of there being a certain percentage that you should get out of every record is really a fairly recent idea. Back in those days most of these people — blues or hillbilly or Mexican music or Cajun or zydeco — considered records as a meal ticket. They wanted a record because if they had a record on jukeboxes then people would come and hear them perform live and they [the artists] would make money [that way]."

Strachwitz added that many performers from the 20s through the 50s didn't know anything about publishing rights or authorship rights, and the accompanying royalties. In Hopkins' case he "would go to Bill Quinn who had Gold Star Records [in Houston] and say, 'Let me cut a couple of sides, give me $200' and Bill said, 'OK' and Lightning was satisfied with the flat fee. But," Strachwitz continued, "sometimes companies would ask him [Hopkins] to do an alternate take and say, 'That one didn't quite take right, do that song again.'"

Since Hopkins often improvised on the spot, lyrics for the same song frequently varied. Strachwitz related that "Hopkins found out they would put out the alternate take with a different title on it but they hadn't paid him for it and that's what pissed him off."

Over the years, Arhoolie has recorded sessions by zydeco king Clifton Chenier, top Cajun band Beausoleil, hillbilly boogie matriarch Rose Maddox, and the prominent conjunto accordionist Flaco Jimenez. But Strachwitz has also recorded other excellent, but lesser-known, roots music artists such as the Baltimore-based Venezuelan vallenato- style accordionist Ivan Cuesta, Afghani lute player Aziz Herawi, and the percussion-laden garifuna rhythm band from Belize, Chatuye. "A lot of this music is brought to my attention by somebody else," said Strachwitz. "Cuesta, Herawi, and Chatuye were brought to me by Joe Wilson who runs the National Council for the Traditional Arts. Joe took me to a house party and we heard Herawi and I thought, man this cat can play that thing. He's just like a David Grisman on the lute. We arranged for another house party and I recorded that." But more detective work, this time in Mexico, linked Strachwitz with the harp-led Conjunto Alma de Apatzingan from the state of Michoacán. While visiting Mexico and shopping at a market, Strachwitz bought some cassettes of the band, and "it turned out the little company that put out the cassettes was right there in town. We went to see this company and... [a staffer] said, 'Yeah, these guys are right down south of here.' We drove all over Apatzingan but never did find them. I finally went back to the record label" and completed a licensing deal, which resulted in the CD Arriba! Tierra Caliente (CD 426).

While talking about all these performers, Strachwitz radiated an aura of enthusiasm and vitality, even over cross- continental phone lines. What fuels his enthusiasm and support is the vibrancy, spirit, drive, and spontaneity he finds in the music. He talked about the viability of vernacular roots music, and observed that if you look for it, you can find authentic folk and traditional music all over the globe.

He discussed some examples of healthy, living musical traditions — specifically mountain music from Poland and the country and rural music of Mexico. What he saw and heard on a recent trip to the city of Ojinaga in Mexico, during which Strachwitz recorded music for an upcoming film, reinforced the latter to him. In the Ojinaga area, he said "The songs they care about there — they make up these corridos — are almost all about drug trafficking because that's the work down there. The big guy in Ojinaga was Pablo Acosta; almost every other song is about him. The Federales killed him about six years ago. He was the big hero for them [the local residents]. He spent money on building an old folks home. He helped older, poor people to bury their relatives. He would pass around goats that he would buy in Texas. It wasn't all for the benefit of these people; he hoped that they would also become his friends and watch out for the Federales so they wouldn't capture him. Anyway, he became a real hero, and this is the stuff that's vibrantly alive there... [played by] little conjuntos with just an accordion, bajo sexto and the string bass.

"In Poland I thought there wasn't any old time music left any more but I went on a trip and happened to go to the Tatra Mountains. There was an old time little string band with three fiddles and a bowed bass and [singers] just hollering those old Polish country songs: góral music. It's just pure country; I thought that had died long ago."

Strachwitz rolled on about exuberance, tradition, revival, and innovation. "I'm not an old fogie. I like whatever is full of vitality. In California what really knocks me out [now]... is this craze for banda music, these huge Mexican brass bands. Almost every Mexican state has a tradition for banda music, but the most dynamic is probably from the state of Sinaloa because it has incredible rhythmic drive and swing to it. Suddenly it pops up here and it was almost dead down there, because people wanted disco and all that bullshit. All of a sudden Mexican immigrant kids in California decide, 'This is something to dance to. We're proud to be Mexicanos. We don't want to dance to the gringo disco shit.' And they dance this real nasty, wild, crazy dance and it became the most popular music on the West coast, even on the radio. I don't know who set it off, it's a mystery of folk evolution."

The conversation switched from the audience for various roots music genres to the audience for recordings on the Arhoolie label. A quote from Strachwitz' liner notes to French Blues (CD 373), Arhoolie's compilation of late 1940s-early 1950s material by Cajun accordionist Nathan Abshire, explained his philosophy: "If we can sell 3,200 of this CD almost 45 years later, [which is about as much as the single 'Pine Grove Blues' sold when it came out], we will also gladly call it a success." When asked how he can keep Arhoolie afloat if selling 3,200 is a success? Strachwitz responded that with reissues he breaks even selling around 1,000 copies if the material is taken from old 78s; the costs are just declicking, noise reduction, and royalties to the original producer. But he did acknowledge that the business of reissues of older material is getting trickier. "When I grew up, when one record came out by Lightning Hopkins it was a celebration. Now we have inundation. Almost everything that has ever been recorded is becoming available. It's getting tougher and tougher to get into stores." He thinks Arhoolie's releases are successful because "people appreciate our quality and our devotion to really authentic things and to giving them maximum value for their money — I've reissued almost all my CDs with maximum playing time in mind."

Strachwitz' fanaticism as a collector of 78 rpms, especially of Mexican and Mexican-American music, is the well from which the tracks from the acclaimed compilation Corridos & Tragedias de la Frontera: First Recordings of Historic Mexican-American Ballads 1928-1937 (CD 7019/7020) were drawn. All the material on this two-disc set was remastered and transferred-to-tape from Strachwitz' own record collection. He is especially proud of his high-quality remastering and transferring equipment, and says there's an art to transferring 78s properly, and he takes great pains to do it right. The thorough, fascinating documentation of the songs in Corridos' 168 page booklet is helpful to both academic and novice alike, and Strachwitz is proud of that also: "I guess maybe it's that school teacher in me. There's so much history there. People ought to be aware of their own history. And if we have a way to put it there, I think we ought to try and do it."

Musician and co-producer John Lumsdaine's liner notes to blues pianist Katie Webster's disc I Know That's Right (CD 393) describe Strachwitz' style: "Making the record was a fast, wild ride as it often is recording with Chris [Strachwitz laughed here]... recording in the old down home style, everything done live. In one room we do maybe two takes... We'd hold onto our hats and try a run. It was a classic Chris session, all love, feel and contagious energy." So exactly what is a classic Strachwitz recording session like?

The important thing for him was just to "let 'em rip.... To me, most of these musicians don't seem to care that much whether they miss a note here or there... It's the feeling of the song, the whole drive, the energy — that's what matters and I guess most of my records are really like that." He specifically recalled his first session with Fred McDowell: "I recorded the first night I met him in Como, Mississippi. It's pretty much all on his first CD [Mississippi Delta Blues (CD 304)]. He was just feeling fantastic. We got along real good, he just poured it out, one number after the other. We never did anything twice.

"I should be more concerned especially with larger groups, where they have to have a kind of arrangement," Strachwitz admitted. "It may not be a formal written arrangement, just a verbal one." But the spark and spontaneity of a live session made its way onto a recent release by the New Orleans group Treme Brass Band, Gimme My Money Back (CD 417). Although he spent a good deal of time on studio recordings, Strachwitz told me, "I was in New Orleans one day and Treme happened to be doing a radio broadcast. I heard it driving back to the place where I was staying. I called the station and asked if they were recording the broadcast. When they said 'Yes,' I said, 'Thank God'... [That live material] is on the CD because everything they did that day was just fantastic. It was just ad-lib, live kicking ass, New Orleans street band music. It's just a good case in point of how the best stuff happens..."

Looking toward future releases, Strachwitz notes that Arhoolie plans to release even more Mexican music. Included in this category is a 4-CD box set of material recorded between 1907 and 1970 tentatively titled The Mexican Revolution — The Heroes and Events: 1910-1920 and Beyond. "I'd like to present more traditions from the 30s and 40s and 50s from around the world," he said. "But the [original 78 rpm] records are very hard to find, at least the really authentic stuff. We're importing Viennese music from the turn of the century to the present and it's very catchy." He said that some folks think he's crazy to want to reissue "corny songs from scratchy old records, but the problem is our life isn't long enough to hear all this good shit. Maybe I'll have to have part two when I get to the next world."

Strachwitz praised his small but dedicated Arhoolie Records staff. He also mused that "I feel at home in almost every funky culture that I come across" and meeting so many musicians and enthusiasts of roots music is "really my biggest thrill out of all this. Not just putting out the music of people that I felt were awfully good — and I'm glad somebody else in the world has a chance to hear them — but also it has brought me into contact with so many human beings and their ways of living that I would have never been able to experience in any other business, and on a really intriguing level. I think that's the most rewarding part of it. If I'd been a diplomat or something maybe I would have met a lot of high falutin' folks here and there, but I just enjoy these people, and what they have to offer me, so much."

Annotated, illustrated 114-page catalog of all Arhoolie cassette and CD releases available for $2 from: Arhoolie Records, 10341 San Pablo Avenue, El Cerrito, CA 94350