One of my favorite gospel albums has the mouthful title An Evening With Rev. Louis Overstreet, His Guitar, His Four Sons, and The Congregation of St. Luke Powerhouse Church of God In Christ. Released in 1963, it’s a live (and most lively) recording of one night’s church service in Phoenix. Its cover shows a robed, Stratocaster-toting Rev. Overstreet and his adolescent sons set up on a sidewalk, the kids clapping, and playing tambourine and washboard. How could I possibly resist checking out what was in the grooves?
The man who recorded the event, took the cover photograph, and released it on his Arhoolie Records label was the late Chris Strachwitz. The back cover of the just-published book, Down Home Music: The Stories and Photographs of Chris Strachwitz, has testimonials from Bonnie Raitt, Billy Gibbons, Ry Cooder, and Steve Miller. But it’s Taj Mahal who crystalizes Strachwitz’s importance most eloquently: “Without the aid of Chris’ humanity, foresight, dedication, and love in recording these artists on wax, films, and photographs, this whole genre might have suffered and sustained massive dis-inclusion, lost forever, slipping away without a trace of existing.” He also refers to the tome’s contents as “monumental treasures.”
I would only clarify that Arhoolie encompasses genres, plural. There’s blues, Cajun, zydeco, conjunto, mariachi, Dixieland, bluegrass, boogie-woogie, folk, modern jazz, sacred steel, hillbilly, ragtime, Western swing, polka, klezmer, and musics from Mexico, Laos, Poland, Cuba, the Balkans, and more – dictated solely by Strachwitz’s eclectic tastes. There’s even an album of Greek-Oriental Rebetica Songs & Dances.
Esoteric? In some cases, for sure. As music journalist Joel Selvin told me, “One can only imagine what the sales figures are like for Austrian Folk Music, Vol. 2. I well remember when 3,000 copies of his album (Takin’ My Time, 1971) made Charlie Musselwhite the label’s best-selling artist – by a wide margin.”
But numbers weren’t the objective of his one-man operation. Not to sound overly academic, but the goal was preservation. In the process, Strachwitz changed the lives of many artists. Lightnin’ Hopkins and Clifton Chenier had recorded previously, but Mance Lipscomb, a 65-year-old sharecropper virtually unknown outside Navasota, Texas, had never recorded prior to the label’s first release, Texas Songster. Along with several more albums, it gave him a career and worldwide acclaim.
In ’74, Musselwhite invited me to a session for his Arhoolie follow-up, Goin’ Back Down South, for which Chris entrusted me with writing my first liner notes. In the film This Ain’t No Mouse Music (the German-born Strachwitz’s term for inconsequential, commercial pop), the self-described song catcher said, “My stuff isn’t produced; I just catch it as it is.” The nonintrusive M.O. that I witnessed was to let musicians be themselves and get a good performance.
Photographing musicians, Strachwitz’s attitude was much the same as recording them. The 182 pages of black-and-white photographs capture the musicians in their environment: at home, with friends and family, playing a juke joint or backyard party. In terms of guitar, it’s a treasure trove – with John Jackson, Robert Pete Williams, Ann Savoy, Frankie Lee Sims, Lil’ Son Jackson, Johnny Young, Lowell Fulson, Big Joe Williams, Houston Stackhouse, Earl Hooker, Del McCoury, Lydia Mendoza playing bajo sexto, Black Ace playing his steel-bodied National on his lap, and B.B. King jamming with cousin Bukka White.
The famous outdoor picture of Sonny Boy Williamson and his band was taken in 1965, after the harmonica icon had done his King Biscuit radio show in Helena, Arkansas. One of the most-striking photos is of Lipscomb, shot from behind, in front of thousands of fans at the Greek Theater in Berkeley in ’63.
In ’95, the nonprofit Arhoolie Foundation was launched to preserve the Strachwitz Frontera Collection, the largest-known archive of historic Mexican and Mexican-American recorded music. In 2016, the Smithsonian Institution acquired Arhoolie’s catalog for its Folkways label.
Accompanying Strachwitz’s first-person captions are 50 pages of illuminating text by co-author Selvin, who told me, “Chris did more than 400 albums on the Arhoolie label. There were new recordings during the CD era and tons of reissues, with BeauSoleil probably the biggest seller. But he made Smithsonian agree to always keep everything in print, like he did.” The indefatigable Strachwitz also championed and advocated for his artists. So when the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers included a cover of “You Gotta Move,” he wrote to them to ensure that royalties were paid to Mississippi Fred McDowell, whose version he’d recorded six years prior. “I was able to give Fred the biggest check he’d ever seen in his life,” Strachwitz later said.
On May 5, 2023, Strachwitz passed away at age 91, leaving a legacy precious few have approached in the record business.
This article originally appeared in VG’s April 2024 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
