[Dixielandjazz] 50th Anniversary of Arhoolie Records

[Harry Callaghan]

Yes, and I love My Kinky Old Mama too.

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 12:51 PM, david richoux <domitype at gmail.com> wrote:

> One of my favorite regional record stores, Downhome Music in El
> Cerrito is in the same building as Arhoolie Records - I have run into
> Chris Strachwitz at music festivals all over the country - while not
> everything they record and publish is OKOM it is mostly MKOM!
>
> Dave Richoux
>
> --------------------------
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/opinion/14mon4.html?_r=1
>
> Sounds Like America
> By LAWRENCE DOWNES
> Berkeley, Calif.
>
> The party space wasn’t perfect. There were no wandering dogs or
> children, no grass or worn linoleum underfoot. Nobody had pushed
> benches to the walls to make room for dancing. Nobody was shoeless,
> shirtless or visibly intoxicated, though the man of honor did seem
> drunk with delight.
>
> It should have been a backyard in the bayou or barrio. But a cozy
> theater was still a fine place to celebrate the last 50 years of Chris
> Strachwitz’s life.
>
> Mr. Strachwitz is the founder of Arhoolie Records, a little label in
> El Cerrito, just north of Berkeley, dedicated to America’s roots:
> blues, bluegrass, Mexican, Tex-Mex, country, Cajun, zydeco, Hawaiian,
> gospel. If it was homegrown and honest Mr. Strachwitz found it,
> captured it and shared it.
>
> Mr. Strachwitz, 79, left Germany at 13 and has been discovering
> America ever since. Arhoolie’s 50th anniversary celebration this month
> went three nights, each one a tribute to his life’s work, but also to
> the geniuses who made America an immigration nation.
>
> The lineup told the story:
>
> There was a Mexican-American from San Antonio, singing in Spanish with
> a squeezebox, an instrument brought by Germans and Poles to the Rio
> Grande borderlands and adapted by Mexicans there with wild abandon.
> And a white guitarist from Santa Monica who grew up idolizing old
> black bluesmen, playing a song about bagels, and also “Wooly Bully,”
> accompanied by a thumping sousaphone and young Mexican-American women
> stomping out the beat on a wooden box.
>
> A Mexican-roots band played in the son jarocho style, to the clacking
> rhythm of a quijada, a donkey’s jawbone. A bluegrass musician
> channeled Bill Monroe. A Cajun guitarist did a riff on Hawaiian
> slack-key. An all-women’s string band led the folkie-dokie singalong
> “Goodnight Irene,” and ended everything with “I Bid You Goodnight,” a
> lullaby from the guitarist Joseph Spence, of the Bahamas.
>
> That was just the first night. Still to come were the jazz combo, the
> New Orleans brass band, the blues chanteuse and the long unanticipated
> reunion of The Goodtime Washboard 3.
>
> Each night had a melancholy undercurrent. Roots music, uprooted, loses
> its essence. American regionalism has died out as strip malls have
> buried farms, ranches and dance halls. The fear that the people’s
> music is doomed to end life as a PBS special, looped over and over,
> was the joke behind “A Mighty Wind” — a good one, because it’s mostly
> true.
>
> But not completely. Barbara Dane, a Bay Area blues singer since the
> early ’60s, still has pipes of polished brass. Ry Cooder sang a new
> song about evil bankers and combined two old ones — “Vigilante Man” by
> Woody Guthrie and “Across the Borderline” — adding spy planes and
> Dodge Ram trucks, for a fresh commentary on today’s immigration
> lunacy.
>
> Mr. Strachwitz, who was due for hip replacement the minute the
> anniversary folderol was over, beamed from the edge of the stage,
> dancing, waving his cane and giving out hugs. He doesn’t record
> anymore, but he’s busy: he has the largest collection of
> Mexican-American border recordings anywhere, and is digitizing them
> all. The concerts were a fund-raiser to finish the project.
>
> And there’s still tomorrow to look to, thanks, as always, to new
> immigrants. It was the Mexicans — the people of the future, Mr. Cooder
> calls them — who supplied the most potent doses of immediacy and
> urgency. The youngest act by decades, Los Cenzontles, is based in an
> arts center in a strip mall in San Pablo, a gritty Bay Area town
> troubled by gangs and poverty but also energized by newcomers:
> Filipinos, Southeast Asians, Chinese.
>
> The group’s founder, Eugene Rodriguez, invited the audience to come up
> from Berkeley to visit, to discover an America still being reborn.
>
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Didja evah wonder why there are more horses' asses than there are
horses?
- Norvel Jackson (1921-1990)