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John Peel Wiki
in: Record Labels, Discography, Compilations

Arhoolie Records

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Arhoolie Records is an American small independent record label formerly run by Chris Strachwitz (1931-2023) and is based in El Cerrito, California, United States (it is actually located in Richmond Annex but has an El Cerrito postal address.) The label was founded by Strachwitz in 1960 as a way for him to record and produce music by previously obscure "down-home blues" artists such as Lightnin' Hopkins, Snooks Eaglin, and Bill Gaither. Arhoolie still publishes blues and folk music, Tejano music including Lydia Mendoza, Los Alegres de Terán, Flaco Jiménez, regional Mexican music, cajun, zydeco, and bluegrass.

Chris Strachwitz immigrated with his family from Silesia in 1947, and became enamored with American regional music after seeing the film New Orleans. He eventually settled in the San Francisco bay area, and in 1960 he headed to Texas to record bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins, but it turned out that Hopkins was in Berkeley for a performance engagement. He met up with historian Mack McCormick, and together they traveled to Navasota, Texas where Strachwitz recorded Mance Lipscomb for what would become the first Arhoolie LP, Texas Sharecropper and Songster. The name "Arhoolie" was suggested by McCormick, deriving from a word for a field holler. Strachwitz also recorded "Black Ace" Turner, Li'l Son Jackson and "Whistling" Alex Moore on the same trip, and later in the year recorded Big Joe Williams and Mercy Dee Walton in California.

He also began reissuing archive material, both of R&B singers such as Big Joe Turner and Lowell Fulson who had recorded for the defunct Swingtime label, and old country and western recordings on his Old Timey label, started in 1962. Strachwitz continued traveling to make field recordings of blues musicians, notably Mississippi Fred McDowell - whom he first recorded in 1964 - Juke Boy Bonner, K. C. Douglas, and Clifton Chenier. From 1965, he also hosted a Sunday afternoon music program on Pacifica Radio's KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California, which ran until 1995.

Links To Peel[]

Incidentally if you're a blues fan there are many essential L.P.s on Blues Classics and Arhoolie. In fact you could buy any record on these labels and buy well. Also available from One Stop.
(John Peel, Perfumed Garden column, International Times, March 8-21, 1968)[1]

Arh

It seems that Peel was aware of Arhoolie Records before his return to the UK in 1967, as he mentioned on the show of 22 February 1990 that he had bought an LP by the Black Ace when he was living in Dallas in 1960, in the time when he was a young blues collector newly arrived in the USA. (The album was one of Arhoolie's first issues and unlike many of the label's products, also had a limited issue release in the UK.) He may also have acquired other Arhoolie releases during his years in the USA, particularly those by his all-time favourite bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins. But Arhoolie and its subsidiary labels Blues Classics and Old Timey were distributed in Britain during the years of the blues boom in the late 1960s and 1970s and could be found in record shops which stocked imports - such as One Stop Records, which Peel mentions in the IT quote shown above. Much later, some Arhoolie material was issued in the UK by Ace Records.

His affection for the label proved to be a lasting one, as he continued to play tracks from its releases for the rest of his radio career, although he tended to favour its blues, bluegrass, cajun and zydeco albums and didn't show much interest in the Tex-Mex and Mexican music which became an Arhoolie speciality and which was more to the taste of his colleague Andy Kershaw.[2] An exception to this was an album of Peruvian music issued on the label which Peel played in 1990, predicting uncannily that if he went to Peru he might not come back, although at that time he feared being kidnapped by guerillas rather than the health problems which led to his death during a holiday there in 2004.

The label also had an influence on artists Peel favoured, among them John Fahey, who belonged to the same circle of blues record collectors as label founder Chris Strachwitz and like him, lived in Berkeley in the mid-1960s. Country Joe McDonald, then a local protest singer, made his recording debut with Strachwitz's assistance in 1965 with an EP which included an early version of his "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die-Rag"; when the song later became famous, Strachwitz and Arhoolie benefited from a share of the royalties. Ry Cooder was another Californian who admired Arhoolie's work and collaborated with probably the best-known of the label's Mexican artists, Flaco Jiménez.

As a result of the blues revival, there was a mini-trend for Cajun music, a previously little-known style in the UK, in 1969. Arhoolie's albums of Cajun and Zydeco music were available as imports at the time. In his memoir Beeswing (2021) Richard Thompson recalls acquiring some of these LPs from James Asman's Record Shop in London, inspiring Fairport Convention's French-language Bob Dylan cover, "Si Tu Dois Partir", and Thompson's song "Cajun Woman" from the band's Unhalfbricking album. But these were Cajun-influenced rather than covers of "pure" Cajun music - unlike Hapshash And The Coloured Coat's version of the traditional Cajun song "Colinda", which Peel played on the show of 16 March 1969.

Many Arhoolie artists were little-known outside their local areas, but Fred McDowell and Juke Boy Bonner both visited Britain in 1969 and did sessions for Peel in that year. Bonner was one of a package of Arhoolie artists, put together by Chris Strachwitz, who toured Europe in 1969 as that year's American Folk Blues Festival[3]; others whose records made it onto Top Gear playlists included Clifton Chenier and Earl Hooker.

Apart from that, Peel played many tracks from Arhoolie LPs, including a number of favourites which received multiple plays, like Shuk Richard and Marie Falcon's Cajun French version of "Wild Side Of Life", "Le Cote Farouche de la Vic" (sic), first played on Top Gear on 18 July 1970, and Sam McGee 's guitar instrumental "Ching Chong", which he enthused over in the 1980s and '90s. While JP usually chose blues tracks in the 1960s and '70s (Lightnin' Hopkins, Fred McDowell, Li'l Son Jackson, the Black Ace), he later showed an interest in Arhoolie's reissues of early country music, from the likes of the Carter Family, the Blue Sky Boys and the Maddox Brothers And Rose. He also liked some of the label's one-offs; the street musician George Coleman ("Bongo Joe") and the steel guitarist Sonny Treadway.

Sessions[]

Compilations[]

(Tracks played by Peel from various artist (v/a) releases on Arhoolie and related labels, listed by release, in order of first play. The DJ is not known to have given airtime to v/a releases on the Blues Classics subsidiary, although he did play albums on the imprint by artists including Lightnin' Hopkins and Albert Ammons. Please add more information if known.)

(LP - Cajun Music: The Early 50s) Arhoolie 5008

  • 18 July 1970: Shuk Richard & His Louisiana Aces: Le Cote Farouche De La Vic (JP: "a good LP - you should listen to it as a change from all the pseudo-progressive nonsense....")
  • Radio Luxembourg Tracklistings 2 (1972): Shuk Richard & His Louisiana Aces: La Cote Farouche De La Vic
  • 21 November 1989: Shuk Richard & His Louisiana Aces: Le Cote Farouche De La Vic
  • 02 December 1989 (BFBS): Shuk Richard & His Louisiana Aces: Le Cote Farouche De La Vie (The Wild Side Of Life)

(LP - Southern Dance Music, Vol. 2) Old-Timey Rec. LP 101, (1965)

(LP - Texas-Mexican Border Music Vol. 12 - Norteño Acordeon Part 2; San Antonio, The 1940's And 50’s) Folklyric

(LP - Western Swing, Blues, Boogie And Honky Tonk Vol. 8) Old Timey

(LP - Classic Country Duets) Old Timey

(LP - Texas-Mexican Border Music Vol. 24 - The Texas-Mexican Conjunto) Folklyric

(LP - Cajun Fais Do-Do) Arhoolie

(LP - The Golden Age Of Gospel Singing) Folklyric

(LP - The Earliest Mariachi Recordings 1906-1936) Folklyric

(LP - Where Was Butler? - A Calypso Documentary From Trinidad) Folklyric

(CD - Huayno Music Of Peru, Vol. 1 (1949-1989)) Arhoolie

(CD - Hillbilly Jamboree) Ace[1]

Sam_McGee_-_Ching_Chong

Sam McGee - Ching Chong

See Also[]

External links[]

References[]

  1. ↑ All material licenced from Arhoolie Records, recorded and co-compiled by Chris Strachwitz. 'Ching Chong' by Sam McGee was included in Peel's Ace Records Top Ten.
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