How's this for a story behind the discovery of a legend: It's 1960 and young German expat, California-transplant Chris Strachwitz is blown away by the country blues recordings of the Texas bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins. So the novice producer and a friend/fellow music enthusiast hop in a car, Texas-bound. Though they didn't find Hopkins, serendipity lurked.
"We arrived in Texas, but Lightnin' had just left to play at a folk fest in California," Strachwitz says of the beginning of a forty-year adventure that has been captured in the Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Collection. "So [Strachwitz's friend] Mack McCormick said, 'Chris we have a car, maybe we can find people like him out there in the piney woods, maybe.' And we just drove towards Navasota [Tex.], because Mack had a sneaky feeling this man named Tom Moore, that Lightnin' had made a record about, lived in that area someplace, that there actually was such a person. So we went to Navasota and we walked into the first feed store that we could find, and asked, 'Does Tom Moore live in this town?'"
The visit paid off, Strachwitz and his companion tracked down a Mr. Tom Moore, asked the farm-owner/businessman if he had any guitar pickers among his employees. Through Moore, the duo discovered Mance Lipscomb out cutting grass on a tractor on the highway. It was the perfect coming together of forces. Lipscomb became the first artist to record an LP for Strachwitz's new baby, Arhoolie Records. Over the next sixteen years (until Lipscomb's death in 1976 at age eighty) he recorded prolifically for Arhoolie and garnered the attention worthy of one of the great country bluesmen of the century. Lipscomb gave Strachwitz and Arhoolie the cornerstone they needed to become a fully developed label and Strachwitz gave Lipscomb a voice that took him from that tractor to the Berkeley Folk Festival, where, armed with just his acoustic guitar, Lipscomb held more than 40,000 fans in rapt attention.
"Once, when Mance was playing the Berkeley festival, [Alan] Lomax asked him, 'Mance, how come I didn't discover you?'" Strachwitz says with a laugh. Over the past forty years, a bloodhound-like sense of direction has led Strachwitz to take his place alongside the Lomax family in the sparsely populated pantheon of musical preservationists in America. Strachwitz's pursuit of the most base of American vernacular music is so single-minded that its various offshoots are horrifying to him. It's a stance that would sound elitist were it not for its absolute purity. From country blues to urban blues, from bluegrass to mountain music, from zydeco to conjunto and a dizzying selection of styles of Mexican and border music, no label has so thoroughly documented the various fibers that make up the tapestry that is American music as Arhoolie. The four-disc set is a terrific document of one man's passion. Eschewing a genre-defined format, the set instead documents the breadth of American music styles, from Lipscomb's laid-back blues to Del McCoury's high-lonesome bluegrass to Flaco Jimenez's uptempo tejano to Clifton Chenier's imminently danceable zydeco. And that's just scratching the surface.
Ralph Gleason suggested to Strachwitz that running Arhoolie wasn't a job; it was a hobby. Strachwitz agrees, but four decades later, he doesn't seem to have an idea what else he would have done. "I don't think I could've survived being a recording studio engineer who has to record every kind of crap that comes down the road and that's what most record companies have to do."
Thus he hunted and recorded tirelessly. Strachwitz has built a system in which he is able to feed his machine with the product of his machine. When windfalls have come his way, such as when Alan Jackson scored with a cover of K.C. Douglas' "Mercury Blues," Strachwitz funneled money back into Arhoolie, giving more voices an outlet. "With American pop music or blues or jazz or country music, almost everything recorded is available," he says. "This is not the case with Mexican music at all. On this side of the border the Mexicanos couldn't afford to buy records. In Mexico only the rich could afford to buy records, so they recorded very little of their regional music. So there is all of this early stuff that was recorded here. I have a huge collection of it. Something like 14,000 78s and 15,000 45s and thousands and thousands of LPs and they oughta be made available to the public. We're working with UCLA, so hopefully this will happen. They received half a million dollars, but once a university gets funding, they're not eager to turn it loose to someone else."
And if anything brings about weariness in Strachwitz, it's matters of money. From bluesmen to tejanos, he doesn't seem content just issuing music that would otherwise have gone unheard. "I think the sad thing is that the roots always get exploited," he says. "As Mose Ashfield said, 'It belongs to all of us.' Others of us say it belongs to the people who created it, not the label or to you or me. But, I think the real crime of it all is the rural country people, their living conditions have not improved one iota over the time when I first went to Mississippi. They now have big signs outside of Rolling Fork, Miss., saying 'Home of Muddy Waters.' Back in those days you'd hear, 'Better take that nigger back where you found him.' So in that respect it has changed, but the living conditions have gotten worse. It's so difficult to work that out. The music is of individuals, yet it comes from a collective society. But how do you try to get it back to the people. There's no easy answer. For the time being all we can do is pay those relatives and pay the ones that are still alive."
Another difficulty for Strachwitz is finding new frontiers when other wells run dry. "I was lucky," he says of his early days. "People like Lightnin' and Mance existed back then. I don't think there are any such people now. Our rural population has declined dramatically in the last forty years. Even at that time, I'll never forget Mance told me, once at a filling station this kid come up to him and said, 'You know old man you're too damn old. You should be dead by now' [laughs]. It's that kind of attitude, it has to be young. The hip-hop shit has taken over everywhere."
It has even permeated into music beyond North America. "This man in Austria runs this folk organization to document the folklore in that area," he says. "But it's all state-sponsored. He says, 'Chris we have all these great old-timers out here but I can't afford to record them. Those same villages where they came from, their neighbors complain. They say, 'How dare you spend our government money to record these horrible singers? We have nice folk singers now who know how to sing correctly.' It's the same shit the world over. The real characters are being drowned out by either those kind of people or the punks who are desperate to find their own voice and don't know how to do it" [laughs].
So Strachwitz has looked south to the border. "I enjoy the Mexican scenario -- absolutely fascinating," he says. "We're coming out with this CD on a place called La Junta del los Rios called The Devil's Swing. These are ballads from an area that most people have never been to. It's Ojinaga on the Mexican side and on the American side it's Presidio, Tex. They still sing stuff out of oral tradition. Songs that are well over 100 years old."
And talk of Spanish-language music is enough to set off his purist ire. "This recent Latino Grammy stuff that they put on, they totally neglected the Mexican regional music," he says with disgust. "The vernacular music has always been exploited or ripped off or suppressed. Nobody ever seems to go for the pure stuff on a massive scale. It's not commercial enough. To me it's the most gorgeous thing there is. Once people try to imitate it, it's already phony. It doesn't have the damn power that the real stuff has. This country is so rich. It almost includes every nationality that ever existed within our borders but it's so hard to present the real stuff. Here we have the Gipsy Kings going around claiming, 'This is flamenco.' It's always the bullshit that wins out [laughs]. But we can't quit. Frustration will never win."
ANDREW DANSBY
(October 13, 2000)