![]() ![]() Among them were the TexMex compilations Chulas Fronteras (1976) and Del Mero Corazón (1979), soundtracks to documentaries made by Les Blank, with whom Chris formed Brazos Films. I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag, by Country Joe and the Fish, not only became a counterculture anthem but helped finance the building of Down Home Music, Chris’s retail store in El Cerrito, California.īy its 25th birthday the catalogue amounted to almost 300 LPs. In 1965, a local band asked him to record a topical song their singer had written and, rather than charge a session fee, Chris proposed they assign the publishing to his company, Tradition Music. By the end of the 70s, the label was on a secure footing, chiefly because Chris, as he recalled, did “most of the work myself, from recording to editing the tapes, writing notes, taking pictures, ordering pressings and jackets, and shipping the records to distributors … Whatever money came in from sales I would plough right back into making more records and keeping all the albums in print.”Ĭhris Strachwitz, right, with Mance Lipscomb in a scene from the 2013 documentary This Ain’t No Mouse Music. Always a keen record collector, he sold his duplicates to buy a tape-recorder and make his first southern recording trip, during which he encountered Lipscomb.Īrhoolie’s growth in the 1960s and 70s paralleled – and did much to create – the increasing international visibility of American roots music. “I had heard American swing over AFN,” he remembered, “but once in California, radio proved even more interesting.” He listened, fascinated, to hillbilly programmes on the Mexican border station XERB and rhythm and blues on Hunter Hancock’s Harlem Matinee from KFVD in Los Angeles.īy 1953, he was based in the San Francisco Bay area, where he studied political science at the University of California at Berkeley, spent two years in the army and began working as a high-school language teacher. ![]() ![]() His dedication to recording contemporary performers thus declared, Chris began to document their predecessors, creating subsidiary reissue labels: Blues Classics for pre-second world war recordings by Memphis Minnie, Sonny Boy Williamson and others, and Old Timey for white country music, from early stringbands to western swing bands, and Louisiana Cajun music.įrom the folklorist Harry Oster, he acquired the Folklyric label, turning it into a rainbow collective of non-anglophone vernacular idioms: Ukrainian-American and Polish-American fiddling, Hawaiian guitar, klezmer bands, the polka music of Czech–Bohemian Texas, the peerless voice of the TexMex singer Lydia Mendoza.Ĭhris was born in Lower Silesia in Poland, one of the six children of Alexander, a horticulturist, and Friederike the family, having fled the invading Russian army during the second world war, settled in the US in 1947. Photograph: San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers/Getty Imagesīut his appetite for discovering and sharing secret harmonies could not be contained by the blues, and the Arhoolie catalogue soon expanded to embrace street-corner guitar evangelism, dance-hall jazz from New Orleans, and the singer and accordionist Clifton Chenier, “the king of Zydeco”, who would record 11 LPs and more than 30 45s for the label. Chris Strachwitz with a Clifton Chenier album at his Down Home Records store in El Cerrito, California, 2014.
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