​Been here, done gone: Arhoolie Records’ Chris Strachwitz snapped our musical heritage

By Lou Fancher

​Chris Strachwitz was driven by a superhuman fascination with music, for more than 40 decades unflaggingly chronicling what he referred to as the world’s vernacular music, from Zydeco to Tejano, gospel to klezmer.
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The prolific producer and documentarian, who died at age 92 in May, was know for founding the Berkeley-based Arhoolie Records and the Arhoolie Foundation. In 2016, Ed Littlefield’s Sage Foundation purchased the Arhoolie label and gifted it to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in an act that would forever preserve Strachwitz’s contributions to the history of American traditional music. This nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution describes Arhoolie Records as “the most important roots record label of the last 60 years.”

As singer-songwriter Bonnie Raitt says about the upcoming book Arhoolie Records Down Home Music: The Stories and Photographs of Chris Strachwitz (out November 14 on Chronicle Books, $40), “No one has meant more to the preservation and appreciation of Americana roots music than Chris Strachwitz.”

Lydia Mendoza in San Antonio, Texas, 1975The book, co-written by Strachwitz and longtime SF Chronicle music journalist Joel Selvin, centers on 150 photographs selected from the thousands taken by Strachwitz as he drove during over 40 years along both America’s freeways and dusty back-country dirt roads sometimes barely distinguishable as drivable. Strachwitz traveled with a used Leica 35mm camera he’d bought in the 1950s, and often used his photographs for covers of Arhoolie albums. The book’s raw, black-and-white images display a panoply of artists and scenes, create an intimate portrait of 20th century urban and rural landscapes, highlight community dancehalls and home stages. The shots feature pivotal musicians like Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Lydia Mendoza, Clifton Chenier, Big Joe Williams, Ry Cooder, and Flaco Jiménez.

Selvin’s 20,000-word essay “Been Here, Done Gone” introduces Strachwitz’s legacy in largely chronological order. It makes one exception by starting with a story from 1971 in which Strachwitz convinced members of Muddy Waters’ band to sit in on a studio recording session for an album he was making with the Oakland bluesman L.C. “Good Rockin’” Robinson. This tale of an ad hoc session gone wrong, but that that still resulted in five usable tracks, perfectly captures Strachwitz’s “song-catching” capacity, and propels a reader into Selvin’s brisk road trip.

Out of this history, it’s striking that Strachwitz came upon his life’s purpose and musical attachments during the impressionable adolescent years. Could that early interest explain why why they became his grand obsession?

“Nice insight,” says Selvin in a phone interview. “Chris discovering Louis Armstrong and New Orleans jazz at 14 years old, it was ‘bingo!’ You’re soft clay. For me, it was Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead. For Chris, it was Armstrong and later, Lightnin’ Hopkins. Imagine lonely Chris, who had grown up in a rural town [in the German province of Lower Silesia] where his father was an aristocrat. Then boom, comes the war. The Nazis took over the farm, then boom, he was thrown across the ocean. He was living with his great-aunt in Reno, Nevada. in 1947 he discovers this radio show where guys went who felt alienated, frustrated. It was a world he understood. All his bunny trails into that world were impressed into his memory right then and there.”

Strachwitz attended elite schools and his family home offered stability. That didn’t stop him from looking to crack the facade of the Eisenhower years and a culture that he believed was led by white, upper-class, largely Republican men.