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Ever heard of Arhoolie Records? Embarrassingly, we hadn't either until this fantastic article recently appeared in the NY Times:

John F. Kennedy had just been elected president when Chris Strachwitz, Arhoolie's founder and still its owner, sat pasting pictures on the cover of the label's first LP, "Mance Lipscomb: Texas Sharecropper and Songster." Driving across the South a few months earlier, Mr. Strachwitz had recorded that blues singer at home, dreaming of giving up his job as a high school teacher but never imagining that his homespun venture would outlive some of the world's largest recording conglomerates.

To commemorate its 50th anniversary, Arhoolie has released a four-CD collection of songs, ranging in style from the blues of Jesse Fuller to the free jazz of Sonny Simmons, that Mr. Strachwitz recorded between 1954 and 1970 in the San Francisco Bay area. Called "Hear Me Howling: Blues, Ballads & Beyond," the package also includes a 136-page book that tells the history of the label.

You cannot emphasize enough the importance of Strachwitz endeavor in documenting American roots music since the early '60's, much of which we would never know about were it not for his efforts:

Most of Mr. Strachwitz's best-known recordings, though, are from the field, especially in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. That is where, starting in 1960, he found, recorded or helped revive the careers of seminal bluesmen like Bukka White, Lightnin' Hopkins, Lipscomb, Mississippi Fred McDowell and even Clifton Chenier, the accordion-playing King of Zydeco.

He's been an ardent supporter of this music from the very beginning:

"The rhythms haunted me," he said in an interview in his office, cluttered with records, at Arhoolie's headquarters and warehouse. "Id hear all this stuff on the radio, and it just knocked me over. I thought this was absolutely the most wonderful thing I had ever heard."

His unusual background would belie this intense interest in this music, which makes his story even more intriguing:

Born in Germany in 1931 into an aristocratic family as Count Christian Alexander Maria Strachwitz, he spent his childhood under Nazi rule and came to the United States after World War II as a high school student living originally in Reno, Nev.

But many in the industry know the important role that Arhoolie and Strachwitz have played:

Richard K. Spottswood, a prominent musicologist who edited and annotated the Library of Congress's 15-volume series "Folk Music in America" and is the author of "Ethnic Music on Records," said that Mr. Strachwitz's role in preserving American vernacular music has been crucial.

"He is probably more American than many of us, but he experienced this music not as something he was born into and took for granted like the air we breathe, but as something rare and delightful, not available to the rest of the world," Mr. Spottswood said. "Coming from another language and culture, he perhaps saw the artistry in this music a little sooner, a little earlier than the rest of us, and his vision of a kaleidoscopic American musical culture, from Tejano to country and Southwestern blues, has helped thwart the single standard the music industry has tried to impose on us over the years."

The list of American artists who have been influenced by this music run the gambit from from Bob Dylan to the Rolling Stones to Bonnie Raitt and T Bone Burnett:

In his autobiographical "Chronicles Vol. I," Mr. Dylan, a member of the advisory board of the nonprofit Arhoolie Foundation, credits the label as being the place "where I first heard Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Charlie Patton and Tommy Johnson."

Ry Cooder, the Grammy Award-winning guitarist and producer, recalled that "I must have been about 13" the day he took a bus to a blues and folk record store in downtown Los Angeles and for the first time heard Big Joe Williams singing ferociously and playing a nine-string guitar, on an album called "Tough Times." That recording, Arhoolie's second release, changed his life, Mr. Cooder said.

"The whole thing started like it was going to blow up, or fly apart at the seams, and it really took hold of me," he recalled. "I said to myself, 'This is what it ought to be like, total physical involvement with the music, going into it so hard that you just about lose control.'"

He added, "It started me on a path of living, the path I am still on."

Arhoolie Records and Chris Strachwitz. Unique American treasures.

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