Teachin' the blues

Chris Strachwitz celebrates 40 years of being all folked up

by Ted Drozdowski

Lightnin' Hopkins

Lightnin' Hopkins didn't care that Chris Strachwitz had ridden all the way from San Francisco to Houston to record him playing in a beer joint. His price was $100 a song, and if Strachwitz couldn't pony up, he could keep his tape machine in his luggage.

Hopkins and his manager, Mack McCormick, nearly came to blows. But Lightnin' held firmer than a tree frog.

Eventually Strachwitz would get to record Hopkins when the blues legend came out to play in the Bay Area. But defeated in the Southern heat, he began searching the Texas backroads for other guitar pickers. Around Navasota he found Mance Lipscomb, and though this sharecropper's gentle style contrasted sharply with Hopkins's hard attack and often pointed commentary, Strachwitz was taken with the slow-talking Lipscomb's repertoire of blues, ballads, dance tunes, spirituals, children's numbers, work songs, and stories.

So Lipscomb became the first artist to record for the label Strachwitz began with some of his teacher's salary of $7000 a year. And his debut album, Mance Lipscomb: Texas Sharecropper and Songster, became the first on Arhoolie Records. Its black-and-white cover was glued onto its cardboard sleeves by Strachwitz and his friend Wayne Pope, the art director who designed Arhoolie's distinctive guitar-shaped logo.

November 3, 1960, was the night Strachwitz and Pope sat at Strachwitz's kitchen table over a gluepot. Forty years later, Arhoolie is still very much Strachwitz's hands-on operation. And though everything Arhoolie releases fits within the broad embrace of folk music, its catalogue now has hundreds of titles sprawling across blues, country, zydeco, Cajun, Tejano, New Orleans brass band, gospel, Hawaiian, African drum groups, and other subgenres. Each album reflects the ever-curious Strachwitz's personal taste and æsthetics. The recordings are simple and direct, often made at dances or in churches or at picnics or on back porches rather than in studios -- live, raw, and immediate as they happened. Among the participants: bluesmen Fred McDowell, Booker White, and John Littlejohn; country musicians the Hackberry Ramblers and Bill Neely; zydeco king Clifton Chenier and his son C.J.; Cajun trio Dewey Balfa, Marc Savoy, and D.L. Menard; Jewish folk musicians the Klezmorim; ReBirth Brass Band; Flaco Jiménez and Lydia Mendoza from the Texas border; Afghani lute master Aziz Herawi; and sacred steel-guitarists Aubrey Ghent and the Campbell Brothers.

"Things go wrong in studios. They're so much more sterile than beer joints and dance halls," explains Strachwitz. "And some of these guys have never been in a studio before. Take them into a studio for the first time and some of them get scared shitless. Why would I want to do that to somebody?"

All of Arhoolie's music -- including reissues of rare old blues and jazz 78s -- defines a 40-year history for the label and is a testament to the passion that has driven Strachwitz. So it's natural that both are celebrated in the excellent new five-CD box Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Collection: 1960-2000 -- The Journey of Chris Strachwitz.

"I think all of this music has in common some country roots," Strachwitz offers by phone from his cluttered office in El Cerrito, California. "There's a rural base to all of it, whether it's Austrian folk music or Big Mama Thornton -- or at least what I imagine to be a rural base, even if it is city music. It's always music from the low-rent area of cities, where the poor country people move into, or where there's a weird mixture of cultures. I was turned on to all kinds of stuff like this right from the beginning."

The "beginning" the 69-year-old Strachwitz refers to is his arrival in America. Chris grew up in a part of Germany that was annexed by Poland after World War II. The Strachwitz family fled their home as the Russian army advanced, moving until they made a final exodus to Reno, Nevada, in 1947.

Chris had already been fond of American music. His mother had brought some 78s home from a late-1930s trip to the US. Chris spun Al Jolson's "Sonny Boy" and others on the family's hand-cranked Victrola until they wore out. Then, after the war erupted, he heard Tommy Dorsey and Lionel Hampton on Armed Forces Radio.

But in Reno -- as a skinny, insecure foreign kid with few friends -- he found a real refuge in music. First it was hillbilly radio, full of T. Texas Tyler, the Maddox Brothers and Rose, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Then, while attending private school near Santa Barbara, he and a friend caught the movie New Orleans.

"Man, I had heard some New Orleans jazz, but when I saw Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory in this movie I was hooked," he recounts. "I was also picking up the border radio -- hearing Mexican music, ranchero music. I loved it. And I had an English teacher who had a great record collection of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton. I couldn't get enough of all that.

"Everything hit me pretty strong, but I concentrated on the New Orleans stuff. Then I heard the blues. When I heard Lightnin' Hopkins, he floored me. I felt like I had never heard music this honest and plain and genuine. He became my favorite blues singer of all time."

Since then Strachwitz's musical interests have continued to broaden. The box set contains artists from nearly every genre of American folk music plus music from Austria and other nations, recorded mostly in their adopted US cities and occasionally abroad. In the lavish book that accompanies the five CDs -- 107 cuts in all -- Strachwitz explains how he found nearly all of them, from Creole fiddler Canray Fontenot to Florida Pentecostal steel-guitar players Aubrey Ghent and the Campbells. There's also a history of the label and a running commentary on Strachwitz's musical philosophy and Arhoolie's other interests, like its publishing operation and the cultural preservation efforts of the charitable Arhoolie Foundation, which Strachwitz established in 1995. There's even an explanation of how the label got its name: it was taken from a call that Southern fieldhands exchanged.

The extensive liner notes, though often in Strachwitz's voice, were written by music journalist Elijah Wald (a sometime Phoenix contributor whose own book on bluesman Josh White was published last week). Wald also helped choose tracks for the box, establishing a framework for himself and Strachwitz to work within by influencing Strachwitz to choose only cuts that he personally recorded or helped produce.

"That made things manageable, if not entirely representative of Arhoolie," says Strachwitz. "Otherwise I'd probably still be sitting here trying to pick songs."

When Strachwitz began recording artists, in 1959, he had already been in the Army and was teaching in Los Gatos, a town in what's now the Silicon Valley. One day he received a postcard from Sam Charters, the blues historian, whom he had met while attending the University of California at Berkeley. Charters wrote to inform Strachwitz that he'd found his blues hero Hopkins in Houston. Deciding that he needed to hear and possibly record Hopkins in person, Strachwitz bought a tape recorder and drove his sister's car to Albuquerque, then took a bus from there.

Lipscomb had Hopkins's immutable resolve to thank for the good fortune that came in the last 17 years of his life. After Strachwitz began putting out his records, Lipscomb was able to make a living playing rather than busting his ass in the hot sun. And Strachwitz recalls that the first time he put $50 into the hands of Mance and his wife Elnora, they nearly burst into tears, having never had that much money paid to them at one time before.

Strachwitz himself has never made much money from Arhoolie. And there have been many years when the label has just scraped by -- authentic folk music has never burned up the charts. On the plus side, when pop stars have covered tunes like Fred McDowell's "You Got To Move" (the Rolling Stones) and K.C. Douglas's "Mercury Blues" (Steve Miller), or when Country Joe McDonald's manager asked Strachwitz to be the publisher of "Fixin' To Die Rag," which became the anthem of Woodstock in 1969, significant windfalls have resulted. It's those windfalls that have allowed Strachwitz to keep the entire Arhoolie catalogue in print and a roof over his label. Plus deliver significant songwriting royalties to artists and their inheritors.

"When I gave Fred McDowell the check for $7000 from the Rolling Stones, he had never seen that much money in his life," Strachwitz says. "I always tried to make sure the artists enjoyed themselves and maybe made a little money. That's very important. I admire people like Dick Waterman [who managed many famed blues figures during the '60s and '70s] and Bruce Iglauer [founder of blues label Alligator Records], who made the commitments to book and manage their artists, really push to make them money. There are very few rewards in it; it is really a tough business.

"From a larger perspective, it is tragic that the lives of rural people haven't really improved one iota from the days I first started traveling to places like the Louisiana backroads and Clarksdale, Mississippi, to record people. Then on top of that, we have stolen their tradition in a way. I mean, Fred would constantly be playing picnics, parties, balls. Now it seems all they are doing is sitting in front of the stupid TV, being invaded by garbage from the outside.

"That is one of the reasons I keep doing this. I wish that people would become proud of their heritage again, and I think records like Arhoolie's make them proud."

Apparently others do too. This year Strachwitz received an NEA National Heritage Fellowship award for his outstanding contribution as a keeper of tradition. "Even though I can't sing, I can't dance, I was very proud to accept it. Some people are needed to promote these true vernacular traditions -- to give pride not only to the musicians who do it but to maybe inspire some youngsters to take some lessons. People need to keep their music and history alive, to keep performing and learning. To keep teaching."

Teaching is indeed what Strachwitz has done. It's ironic, then, that he lost his classroom job in Los Gatos a few years after starting Arhoolie. "I haven't been consciously aware of continuing to teach through Arhoolie, but I guess I have always had this sort of missionary zeal," he allows. "I find teaching about this music an important thing, because I find it a real tragedy that people are so undereducated in this country about their culture. I mean, there are zillions of black kids in this country who don't even know there was anything before hip-hop and apparently couldn't care less either. And white kids who don't know anything before modern rock. I think that's a real tragedy."