By 1964, Chris Strachwitz had been running his tiny California label, Arhoolie Records, for four years. That February, he was down in Houston to record some more songs by his favorite artist, bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins. Between sessions, Hopkins offered to introduce his wife’s cousin, Clifton Chenier, to the producer. Strachwitz hadn’t cared much for Chenier’s singles on Specialty — he found them too slick — but he was willing to give a listen.
When Strachwitz walked into the juke joint down by Houston’s shipping canals, he found Chenier entertaining a crowd of Louisiana transplants with just his big piano accordion, his French-patois vocals and a drummer. It was a raw, bluesy, stomping sound, and Strachwitz immediately offered to record the duo. No, Chenier said; if he were going to record, he wanted to revive the R&B-combo sound of his hits. No, Strachwitz insisted, this is the sound I want.
Not many folklorists would be so stubborn, but Strachwitz is one of the most opinionated, argumentative producers who ever lugged around a portable tape recorder. That passion has also made him one of the best. And it makes the new five-CD, 96-artist, 107-track box set, “The Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Collection, 1960-2000: The Journey of Chris Strachwitz,” not just a compelling compendium of American vernacular music but also the fascinating autobiography of an eccentric man with a vision.
Unlike a lot of folklorists who embrace any unvarnished down-home artist they might discover, Strachwitz hates much of what he comes across. For example, no one has done more to document the Tex-Mex conjunto scene, but ask him about the contemporary bands, he’ll declare, “Most of them are [junk], a lot of Mickey Mouse synthesizers and guitars.”
But when he hears something he likes, nothing can stem his enthusiasm. He tries to record the music just like he heard it the first time; he doesn’t want to change a thing about it. That’s why the wide variety of Arhoolie recordings — blues, conjunto, jazz, bluegrass, zydeco, mariachi, Cajun, gospel, klezmer, country, brass bands and more — all reflect a common taste, a unifying personality.
“Most of the things I do like seem to be rootsy and regional,” he explains. “I dislike the very saccharine stuff, like the very mellow polka music that’s so schmaltzy. I agree with what the late George Lewis [the New Orleans clarinetist] said: `I like my music sweet, but I like it rough, too.’ Loretta Lynn was that way, but I don’t like this modern country; it’s just MTV rock ‘n’ roll [junk]to my ears. When people come from a rough background, they seem to make much better music.”
On Sept. 22, Strachwitz became the first non-artist to win a National Heritage Fellowship, an award from the National Endowment for the Arts to honor “master conservators of America’s diverse culture.” Past winners include Bill Monroe, Dewey Balfa, John Lee Hooker, Michael Flatley, Doc Watson, B.B. King, Pops Staples, Eddie Blazonczyk and Shirley Caesar, as well as many obscure basketmakers, weavers and blacksmiths.
During the ceremony at George Washington University, the 69-year-old Strachwitz accepted the plaque with the disarming casualness of someone who had strolled into the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. His shaggy hair has gone gray and he is still a head taller than most everyone else. He wore a wry smile, as if enjoying the joke that he would get such an award. But Joe Wilson, head of the National Council of Traditional Arts, which hosted the ceremony, says Strachwitz was a natural pick to be the first folklorist honored.
“Other folklorists approached the music from a scholarly perspective,” Wilson notes, “but Chris let the music speak for itself. He didn’t try to re-create something from the past; he wanted to capture the present. That’s a more profound way of understanding folk culture, understanding that it’s a stream. The banks and the trees stay the same, but you can never put your foot in the stream in the same place twice. “
Strachwitz and the equally stubborn Chenier finally reached a compromise in 1965, the year after they met. They would spend half the recording session on the R&B sound the accordionist aspired to and half on the French-blues sound he actually played in the bars. Arhoolie released one of the French songs, “Louisiana Blues,” as a 45, and it became a surprise hit on jukeboxes from Houston to Lafayette, La. That was the single that persuaded Chenier to stop imitating Fats Domino and to return to his Creole roots. The modern zydeco movement began right there.
“When I recorded Clifton with just a drummer and his brother Cleveland on rub board,” Strachwitz remembers, “I had the engineer bring the drum up to almost the same volume as the singing, so you got a sense of what it sounded like on stage. Other folklorists always focused on the singing and the melody, but this was dance music. . . .
“I’d always loved rhythm. My hippie friends out here in Berkeley didn’t play for dancing; they were hesitant and couldn’t keep the rhythm together. But in Texas and Louisiana, everyone starts playing music on the drums. They may move on to guitar or accordion as they get older, but they all start out on drums, so that rhythm is ingrained. And that’s what grabbed me.”
“When Clifton Chenier received his National Heritage Award in 1984,” Wilson recalls, “I got to talking to him about inventing zydeco. He reminded me that back in 1965 that push-and-pull music was a back-porch music; it was nowhere. That’s why Clifton wanted to do what he called a rock ‘n’ roll record, like Fats Domino. But Chris wanted to record this bluesy French music, and that sold better than the R&B. Now zydeco is everywhere; I was in Italy recently and found a record store with a huge zydeco section. `You have to give that German boy some credit,’ Clifton told me, `He wasn’t as dumb as I thought.'”
Strachwitz was born in eastern Germany in 1931, but his family fled the approaching Russian troops in 1945. Two years later he was a shy, nerdy high school junior in Santa Barbara, Calif.
“Like most teenagers, I was very insecure,” he says. “I couldn’t speak the language that well and I was real skinny, so the other kids made fun of me. Those kids listened to Doris Day and Frank Sinatra, but I identified with the outcasts, and I fell in love with their music.”
The teenage Strachwitz started listening to the border radio station XERB, which was broadcasting hillbilly hits by Bob Wills and T. Texas Tyler. He went to see the movie “New Orleans” and fell in love with the performances by Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory. He heard artists such as Lowell Fulson and Big Jay McNeely at R&B revues hosted by Los Angeles station KFVD, and he began spending all his allowance on 78s by his favorite Dixieland, swing, blues and hillbilly acts.
“Today we’re so inundated by recordings that it’s hard to remember how rare they once were,” Strachwitz points out. “In those days, when a new record came out by T. Texas Tyler or George Lewis, it was a celebration, because it was so unusual. You wore that sucker out.”
By the time Strachwitz had served in the U.S. Army, graduated from college and landed a job teaching high school German, he had a thriving side business selling 78s by mail all over North America and Europe. That let him know there was a market for the blues and jazz he loved, and he got interested in recording some of it himself.
In 1959, he got a postcard from folklorist Sam Charters with the Houston address of Strachwitz’s hero, Lightnin’ Hopkins. As soon as school let out for the summer, the young teacher took an arduous car-and-bus trip to Houston. There he found Hopkins and was seized by an impulse to record the singer right there in the bar. It didn’t work out, but the next summer, Strachwitz was back in Texas with a Japanese portable tape recorder.
On an impulse, he drove northwest of Houston in search of the notorious plantation owner who was the subject of Hopkins’ scathing protest song, “Tom Moore’s Blues.” He found Moore in a Navasota, Texas, feed store, and Moore said that if Strachwitz wanted to hear some local blues singers, he should go down to the train station.
The men at the depot told the out-of-towner that he needed to hear Mance Lipscomb who was cutting grass by the highway, and Strachwitz found Lipscomb just as he was climbing off his tractor. Strachwitz recorded Lipscomb at his home that very night and released the results that fall as the very first Arhoolie album, “Mance Lipscomb: Texas Sharecropper and Songster.”
“What was so amazing about meeting Mance,” Strachwitz recalls, “was he had the whole history of African-American music in his head — everything from children’s songs to blues to ballads to folk songs to spirituals. He was like a preacher in that sense; to be a good preacher in the black community, you had to know your culture from A to Z. They were the original rappers.
“But the world doesn’t stand still. That rural song tradition was coming to an end, and I was lucky to get in on the tail end of it. In this country, there’s always this compulsion to blend older music into something new. Some of the new music is horrible, and some is amazing.”
The Lipscomb album sold modestly well, and Strachwitz soon had the bug. He left his teaching job and threw himself into his fledgling record company.
By 1981, he had recorded bluesman “Mississippi” Fred McDowell, jump-blues shouter Big Mama Thornton, bluegrass singer Del McCoury, jazz saxophonist Sonny Simmons, blues harmonica whiz Charlie Musselwhite, Cajun fiddler Dewey Balfa, Tex-Mex accordionist Flaco Jimenez, zydeco accordionist John Delafose, country singer Rose Maddox and the Cajun band Beausoleil. All of them can be heard on the box set.
“I thought making records was the neatest thing in the world,” Strachwitz remembers. “It was like photography, but you could get the sound, which seemed so much better to me. And it was so easy, because I recorded everything so naturally. It was like the early days of Sun Records; these guys would walk in and just do what they did. You can’t re-create the past and you can’t guess what the future will be; all you can do is take an audio snapshot of the present. This music is of a time and place; it doesn’t work otherwise.”
Arhoolie never sold a lot of records, and the company stayed afloat for 40 years only because Strachwitz owned the publishing copyright on three valuable songs. When Country Joe McDonald’s “Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” wound up on the 1969 “Woodstock” soundtrack album, Strachwitz was able to buy the building where the Arhoolie offices were located.
Because the Rolling Stones recorded Fred McDowell’s “You Got To Move” in 1971, Arhoolie was able to survive the end of the folk boom. And in 1992, when Arhoolie was facing the expensive task of transferring its catalog from vinyl to CD, K.C. Douglas’ “Mercury Blues” was turned into a No. 1 country hit by Alan Jackson.
“Chris has always been completely unselfish,” Wilson argues. “He did what he did because he believed in the music. There was never a business plan for Arhoolie; he was always following his heart. Unlike most record producers and even quite a few folklorists, he approached artists as friends rather than as subject matter. He wanted the people who made this music to be properly rewarded. I’m sure the only significant money Fred McDowell ever saw came from the hands of Chris Strachwitz.”
