The photos and stories of a musical folklorist collected in a new book, ‘Arhoolie Records: Down Home Music’

When Chris Strachwitz died earlier this year at a San Rafael assisted living facility at the age of 91, his extensive obituary in the New York Times heralded him as one of the “leading musical folklorists of the modern recording era.” He was certainly that, and, surprisingly, even more.

As the founder of Arhoolie Records, an independent East Bay label he named after an African American field holler, Strachwitz (pronounced Strack-wits) traveled the country for four decades in search of authentic American roots musicians, discovering and recording such pioneering bluesmen as Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb, zydeco king Clifton Chenier and Tex-Mex legend Flaco Jiménez, among many others in multiple genres.

The Smithsonian Institution bought Arhoolie Records in 2016, praising it as “the most important roots record label of the last 60 years.” Among fans of American vernacular recorded music, Strachwitz’s contributions are well known and widely respected.

But what most people don’t know is that he not only tracked down these then-obscure musicians and recorded them, often in their living rooms, on their front porches, at house parties and in funky roadhouses and juke joints, he also took their photographs, creating a priceless visual record to go along with the musical one. He was passionate about music he called “down home,” and his images reflect that, capturing a bygone era in the dusky corners of America that have all but vanished. For the first time, more than 150 of his best photos, all shot in black and white with his second-hand 35 mm Leica camera, are collected in “Arhoolie Records: Down Home Music” ($40), a beautifully designed coffee table book from Chronicle Books.

It includes a 20,000-word essay by music journalist Joel Selvin, a longtime friend of Strachwitz who worked closely with him on the book for a year and a half. Strachwitz got to see some of the pages while the project was in progress, but, sadly, died before the finished book came out in November.

“He didn’t get to see the book and that’s heartbreaking,” Selvin says. “When I got the package of books, opened it up and saw how gorgeous they are, I succumbed to grief. It swept through me.”

I have to say that I was struck by the quality of the photos and their impact as historic documents, many of them candid shots of the musicians in the act of making the music that Strachwitz loved so much.

“You can just hear the music in the photos,” Selvin says. “They’re redolent of the music.”

As important as these images are, Strachwitz didn’t think much of himself as a photographer, seeing his pictures as simply a tool to help sell his albums rather than as a vital part of the musical history he was chronicling in his field recordings.

“Chris was a much better photographer than he had any sense of himself as,” Selvin says. “To him, his photographs were just utilitarian things he did for album covers or publicity shots. They were sort of like a visual notebook. I would pull out these photos of nightclubs in Texas or Louisiana or these roadhouses in Mississippi and he’d say, ‘Why would you want to put those in the book?’”

Strachwitz was as fascinating a character as the musicians he recorded and photographed. Selvin describes him as “real tall, gawky and awkward with a residual shyness. He clearly was an oddball.” Mexican musicians dubbed him “El Fanático.”

Blues may have been his first love, but his tastes were eclectic and wide-ranging, from bluegrass and gospel to Cajun and zydeco, Mexican American styles, New Orleans jazz, even Czech Bohemian music.

“He was always looking for something that had an authentic feeling in it,” Selvin says. “If that’s what you were about, Chris could resonate with it. He was looking for some kind of an expression of a musician’s soul, and he found it time and time again.”

‘A pilgrimage’

Adding to the Strachwitz mystique, here was someone obsessed with indigenous American music who wasn’t even born in this country. Scion of an aristocratic German family, he emigrated to the U.S. as a teenager after World War II, settling in Reno, Nevada. A stranger in a strange land, he had a hard time acclimating to his adopted country, feeling the same sense of alienation he heard in the blues musicians he listened to on the radio.

After two years in the Army, he graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and taught German in a Bay Area high school for several years before starting Arhoolie Records in 1960, which would become his passion for the rest of his long life. Selvin says Strachwitz’s road-to-Damascus moment occurred when he traveled to Texas on what he called “a pilgrimage” to find Hopkins, then a little-known bluesman who had all but disappeared from the music scene, discovering him playing in a low-rent beer joint in Houston. When Hopkins gave Strachwitz a shout-out from the stage, saying, “This man come all the way from California to hear po’ Lightnin’ play,” the die was cast.

“His life would never be the same,” Selvin writes. “For the next 30 years or so, he would document his travels with a tape recorder and a camera.”

One of my favorite photos in the book is of a jaunty Hopkins, a cigarillo clamped in his gold-capped teeth, posing outside his apartment with a grocery store in the background advertising “fresh rabbits and coons.” That shot became the cover of what Strachwitz called “our best record together.”

“I simply recorded him in his apartment with two microphones, him playing his electric guitar,” he wrote in the caption. “He was very happy with the session because he told me he felt more comfortable if it wasn’t in a studio. When he was all by himself, he felt more at ease to do everything that he wanted to. That was a wonderful record.”

Selvin is particularly fond of a photo of blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson that Strachwitz shot in an alley behind a radio station in Helena, Arkansas.

“That may be the single most famous blues photo ever taken,” he notes. “But it was always cropped. We included the full frame, which has this fantastic field and this funky ramshackle house in the background.”

Some of the photos include second-generation musicians like Bonnie Raitt, Ry Cooder and Peter Rowan, who learned at the feet of the originators that Strachwitz recorded and photographed.

“No one has meant more to the preservation and appreciation of Americana roots music than Chris Strachwitz,” Raitt says in a blurb for the book. “He turned me on to Mississippi Fred McDowell and so many other greats.”

Labor of love

It’s a cliché to say that this book was a labor of love for Selvin, but in this case, it’s literally true. He was a budding, 19-year-old music journalist when he met Strachwitz, who became his mentor. Selvin would go on to become pop music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle for 36 years and the author of more than 20 books on pop musicians.

“Chris sort of took me under his wing,” he recalls. “I’m not sure why. I think it was my enthusiasm for the music. Chris has been part of my journalistic life since the very beginning. I recognized him as the great folklorist of his generation and I plumbed that association as much as I could. I learned so much. I spent as much time with Chris as I could. I got so many stories out of it, so many great times, so much good music.”

And now, some great photos as well.

Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net