The Field Holler that won’t quit: Chris Strachwitz, Arhoolie, Down Home Music, and a Building Worth Saving
A five-minute walk from Panama Sound, on the seam where El Cerrito’s sidewalk meets Richmond’s street address, sits a building that has quietly done more for American vernacular music than almost anywhere else on the West Coast.
For fifty years it has held a record store, a record label, and a film company under one roof, and for the last two years it very nearly didn’t survive its founder’s death. This is the story of how it got there, who built it, and why it’s still worth a visit — or a drive, or a plane ticket — today.
Chris Strachwitz: A Timeline of a Life Spent Chasing Sound
Christian Alexander Maria Strachwitz was born in 1931 in Gross Reichenau, a village in Lower Silesia then part of Germany, into an aristocratic farming family that lost everything when the region became part of postwar Poland.
He arrived in the United States as a teenager in 1947, and by his own account it was a chance encounter with a Lightnin’ Hopkins record that rewired his adolescence and, eventually, his career. He studied at Pomona College, taught high school for a stretch, and spent every spare hour chasing regional music at clubs, dance halls, and back porches.
In the summer of 1960 he made his first serious field-recording trip through Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, and that trip produced Arhoolie’s first release: a Texas songster named Mance Lipscomb, captured with the help of folklorist Mack McCormick, who also coined the label’s name from a regional term for a field holler.
Strachwitz left teaching in 1962 to run the label full-time, and in 1965 he began hosting a long-running Sunday program on Berkeley’s Pacifica station KPFA that stayed on the air for three decades. That same year, a chance introduction to a young Berkeley folksinger named Country Joe McDonald led to a no-charge living-room recording session that yielded an anti-war anthem later immortalized at Woodstock — the royalties from which helped fund Strachwitz’s purchase of a building on San Pablo Avenue in the mid-1970s, which became Arhoolie’s headquarters and, from 1975 onward, the Down Home Music store.
In 1995 he founded the nonprofit Arhoolie Foundation to house and preserve his archives, and in 2016, at 85, he sold the Arhoolie label’s catalog to Smithsonian Folkways, which continues to distribute it worldwide. Chris Strachwitz died on May 5, 2023, at 91, having spent more than six decades as one of the most consequential independent record men in American history.
The Music: A Catalog Built One Front Porch at a Time
What makes Arhoolie’s catalog remarkable isn’t just its size — more than 350 albums across six decades — but its refusal to specialize. Strachwitz’s ear moved fluidly between deep Texas blues, Louisiana Cajun and zydeco, Tejano and norteño conjunto, Appalachian old-time, gospel steel guitar, and Balkan-American brass, treating all of it as equally worth preserving.
The blues wing alone reads like a syllabus: Lightnin’ Hopkins, whom Strachwitz first recorded in 1959; Mance Lipscomb; Mississippi Fred McDowell, whose “You Got to Move” was later covered by the Rolling Stones on Sticky Fingers; Big Mama Thornton; Big Joe Williams; Robert Pete Williams; Juke Boy Bonner; Lil’ Son Jackson; the Black Ace (B.K. Turner); pianist Alex Moore; Texas songster and pianist Robert Shaw; and the singular one-man-band percussionist Bongo Joe Coleman, recorded on the streets of San Antonio.
On the Louisiana side, Clifton Chenier — the self-styled “King of Zydeco” — anchored a roster that included his son C.J. Chenier, Amede Ardoin, Alphonse “Bois Sec” Ardoin and his sons, fiddler Canray Fontenot, John Delafose, and the Sam Brothers Five.
Arhoolie’s Tejano and norteño catalog grew enormously in 1990 when Strachwitz purchased the masters of Ideal Records, bringing in Lydia Mendoza, Chelo Silva, Carmen y Laura, conjunto pioneer Narciso Martínez, orquesta bandleader Beto Villa, accordionist Valerio Longoria, Flaco Jiménez, Santiago Jiménez Jr., and groups like Los Alegres de Terán and Los Pingüinos del Norte. Beyond those three pillars, the label’s reach touched Rose Maddox, Freddy Fender, Cuban percussionist Francisco Aguabella, old-time fiddler Tommy Jarrell, and — in one of the odder detours in the catalog — an early living-room recording of Country Joe McDonald himself.
Whether you know all of these names or none of them, that’s the point: Arhoolie’s mission was never chart position, it was documentation, and the sheer range of the roster is the clearest evidence of how seriously Strachwitz took that job.
Les Blank, Werner Herzog, and the Cameras That Followed the Music
Strachwitz’s closest creative partner outside the studio was Les Blank, the documentary filmmaker who moved to the Bay Area in the 1960s and spent the next five decades training his camera on American vernacular culture — music, food, and the people who made both.
Blank and Strachwitz collaborated directly on three films: Chulas Fronteras (1976), an intimate portrait of Tejano and norteño border culture built around performances by Flaco Jiménez, Lydia Mendoza, and Narciso Martínez; its companion piece Del Mero Corazón (1979); and J’ai Été au Bal (1989), a tribute to Cajun and zydeco music. Blank also made standalone documentaries on Arhoolie artists, including The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins and Hot Pepper, his profile of Clifton Chenier, and both Chulas Fronteras and Blank’s garlic documentary Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers were later selected for preservation in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.
Blank’s other lifelong creative partnership was with Werner Herzog, and it’s worth understanding how that connection sits alongside the Strachwitz story rather than folding into it directly — the two threads run parallel more than they intertwine.
Blank first turned his camera on Herzog for the short film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), documenting Herzog making good on a wager to eat his own boot, and followed it two years later with Burden of Dreams (1982), his acclaimed making-of chronicle of Herzog’s famously grueling Fitzcarraldo shoot in the Amazon — widely regarded as one of the finest documentaries ever made about the act of filmmaking itself.
Herzog and Blank remained friends and mutual admirers for the rest of Blank’s life; Herzog later spoke on camera about his admiration for Blank’s Appalachian old-time film Spend It All.
The throughline connecting all of it is Blank himself: the same restless, unpretentious camera that captured Herzog eating a boot in Berkeley also captured Flaco Jiménez’s accordion runs on the Texas border, because to Blank they were both, in their own way, documents of people doing something with total conviction.
A Legacy Mostly Clean, With a Few Honest Wrinkles
Strachwitz’s reputation, almost uniformly, is that of a fair dealer in a field with a long history of exploitation — folklorists and A&R men who recorded regional and Black vernacular artists for a pittance and kept the publishing for themselves.
Strachwitz went out of his way to avoid that pattern more than once: when the Rolling Stones covered Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “You Got to Move” on Sticky Fingers, Strachwitz pushed back against resistance from the band’s lawyers and secured McDowell substantial royalties while the ailing bluesman was still alive to receive them.
That said, the historical record isn’t entirely without tension. Some blues performers, wary of Arhoolie’s small, niche-market distribution, chose upfront cash payments over deferred royalties — a rational choice at the time, but one that meant they didn’t share in whatever long-term value their recordings accrued.
And the most financially significant transaction in Arhoolie’s history was, on its face, a lopsided one: Strachwitz recorded a young, then-unknown Country Joe McDonald for free in his living room in 1965, and in exchange received the publishing rights to “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” which went on to become a Woodstock-era anthem and effectively bankrolled the label’s growth and its eventual real estate.
Scholars examining Strachwitz’s larger body of work have also noted the basic outsider dynamic inherent in his career — a white, German-born collector of considerable means built his life’s work by documenting predominantly Black, Cajun, and Mexican-American communities — a dynamic Strachwitz himself was self-aware about, and one that shows up in academic discussions of field recording ethics more broadly, without amounting to a specific scandal attached to his name.
What Happened to the Records: The Frontera Collection
Strachwitz was a serious 78 rpm collector before he was a record executive, and that habit metastasized over sixty years into one of the largest privately assembled recorded-sound archives in the country. The bulk of it now lives as the Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings, owned outright by the Arhoolie Foundation and comprising close to 170,000 individual recordings — 78s, 45s, LPs, cassettes, and unreleased reel-to-reel masters — spanning from 1905 through the 1990s, including the earliest known commercial recordings of corridos, rancheras, and norteño and conjunto music.
Rather than shipping the physical collection off to a university archive, Strachwitz and the Arhoolie Foundation struck a digitization partnership in 2001 with UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center, seeded by a $500,000 grant from the Los Tigres del Norte Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Grammy-winning norteño group.
The physical 78s and related materials stayed — and still stay — at the Arhoolie Foundation’s own facility in El Cerrito, while a growing digital mirror, now well over 140,000 recordings, is hosted online by the UCLA Library in partnership with the university’s Digital Library Program.
Strachwitz Frontera Collection website
The broader Arhoolie label catalog — the blues, Cajun, zydeco, and gospel recordings that made up the commercial label itself, as distinct from the Frontera Collection’s raw historical 78s — followed a different but complementary path in 2016, when Strachwitz sold it to Smithsonian Folkways, ensuring national distribution and long-term institutional stewardship while the foundation retained the archival materials, photographs, and unreleased tape.
Smithsonian Folkways Arhoolie website
John McCord: Forty-Plus Years Behind the Counter
If Chris Strachwitz was Down Home Music’s founder, John McCord has been its constant. McCord has managed the store since the early 1980s — well over four decades now — co-running day-to-day operations alongside J.C. Garrett, who joined in 2003. Between them, McCord and Garrett are the reason Down Home Music has remained a functioning, browsable, staffed record store through a change in ownership, a founder’s death, and a real-estate crisis that could easily have ended it.
McCord has also been the store’s public face and institutional memory through all of it — quoted in nearly every piece of press coverage of the building’s recent troubles, and the person visitors are most likely to actually talk to when they walk in the door.
It’s worth saying plainly, as someone who runs a studio a few minutes away: John’s generosity extends well past the counter. He graciously made time to come record a handful of songs at Panama Sound, and one of those recordings will appear on our upcoming Pub Album compilation.
That kind of willingness — a man who has spent forty years being the steady hand behind one of the most important roots-music institutions on the West Coast, taking an afternoon to sing into someone else’s microphones — says as much about the culture Strachwitz built as any catalog number does.
It’s the same ethos Down Home has always run on: music first, ego optional.
Down Home Music: In Jeopardy, and How It Got Saved
Chris Strachwitz personally owned the San Pablo Avenue building that housed Down Home Music, Arhoolie’s offices, and Les Blank Films for nearly fifty years, and his death in May 2023 put that arrangement on a clock. His will granted Les Blank’s son, filmmaker Harrod Blank, a first right of refusal to buy the property, but in October 2024, the Strachwitz family trust announced it planned to put the building on the open market, and all three tenants — Down Home Music, the Arhoolie Foundation, and Les Blank Films — publicly acknowledged they could lose the space that had defined all three organizations for half a century.
Harrod Blank exercised his option in partnership with the Arhoolie Foundation, and the two nonprofits went under contract on the property in November 2024, putting down 10 percent earnest money on an appraised purchase price of roughly $2.4 million, with a deadline in the spring of 2025 to raise the balance. A public GoFundMe campaign — shared across all three organizations — drew more than 300 donors and roughly $67,000 on its own, much of it arriving in a rush of year-end tax-deductible giving.
But the deal was ultimately closed thanks to one major donor whose identity and exact contribution Harrod Blank has kept private, calling the gift the thing that let the purchase clear the finish line.
By mid-2025, the sale was complete: the Arhoolie Foundation and Les Blank Films are now co-owners of the building, with Down Home Music remaining as tenant — a “marriage of the three entities,” as Blank put it, formalizing a relationship that had operated informally for fifty years.
One complication remains unresolved: much of Down Home Music’s retail inventory technically passed to Strachwitz’s heirs along with the rest of the estate, and the store is still working out whether and how to purchase that inventory back at what Blank has described as an unexpectedly steep appraised value.
What Comes Next, and What It Means Beyond El Cerrito
With ownership secured, the three organizations are already leaning into what the building has always done best: functioning as a live venue and community gathering space, not just an archive and a retail counter.
Down Home has hosted informal in-store sets for years — Taj Mahal has dropped in to jam, and performers including Johnny Otis and Peter Rowan have played there over the decades — and McCord and Blank have both talked openly about expanding that programming, with more scheduled live music and Harrod Blank, a filmmaker himself, pushing to bring regular film screenings into the mix.
Down Home Music also continues to anchor community events like the El Cerrito Free Folk Festival, hosting preview performances in its own space ahead of the annual festival.
It’s genuinely hard to overstate what this building represents for the region. Technically, Down Home Music sits in the city of Richmond — the sidewalk out front is El Cerrito’s, the storefront is Richmond’s — which makes it a fitting, almost literal symbol of an East Bay music culture that has never much cared about municipal boundary lines.
For El Cerrito, it’s one of the only surviving links to a moment when the town was a real node in the national roots-music map. For Richmond and the wider East Bay, it’s proof that an independent, artist-first business model can outlive its founder if the community around it decides it’s worth fighting for.
For the Bay Area more broadly, it sits alongside a shrinking handful of institutions — record stores, small labels, listening rooms — that still treat regional and vernacular music as worth documenting on its own terms rather than optimizing it for a platform’s algorithm.
And nationally, Arhoolie’s catalog and the Frontera Collection remain foundational reference points for anyone studying American blues, Cajun, zydeco, or Tejano music — the kind of archive that university researchers, documentarians, and touring musicians alike still go back to, more than sixty years after a 250-copy Mance Lipscomb LP started the whole thing.
Go Visit. Sign Up. Show Up.
If you’re a new client of Panama Sound, a returning one, or just passing through the East Bay, put Down Home Music on your list. It’s a short drive from the studio, the bins are deep, the staff — John and J.C. especially — actually know what they’re talking about, and every dollar spent there supports the same community fabric this whole studio operates inside of.
Sign up for their email list so you know when the next in-store set, screening, or Free Folk Festival preview lands, and if you’re in town when something’s happening, go. This is exactly the kind of independent, artist-first infrastructure that’s disappearing everywhere else in the music business — it survived because people showed up for it once already. It’s worth doing again.
A Small Postscript on Coincidence
I went to high school at MacGregor in Albany, a continuation school, and in the 90s I spent a fair number of nights at Berkeley house parties with a kid named Devin McDonald. I had no real sense at the time that his last name meant anything beyond a name — he was just a friend, one more person at one more party. Though he had a big, zany personality, he was always laughing.
Devin is Country Joe McDonald’s son. The same Country Joe McDonald whose free living-room recording session with Chris Strachwitz in 1965 turned into a Woodstock-era anthem, funded the purchase of the Down Home Music building, and indirectly built the roof under which John McCord has spent the last forty-plus years.
Devin, for what it’s worth, grew up a few blocks from Mr. Mopps’ Toy Shop on Martin Luther King Jr. Way, fell for the place as a kid, and bought it with his partner Jenny Stevenson in 2010 when it looked like it might close for good — he’s been running it, and raising his own family, ever since.
I don’t know what to call a coincidence like that beyond just naming it. A regional record label funded in part by a song written by a man whose kid I used to hang around with as a teenager, in a building five minutes from a studio I’d end up owning thirty years later, staffed by a man generous enough to come sing into my microphones for a record I’m putting together right now. Call it a small town, call it the East Bay being smaller than it looks, call it serendipity or providence or nothing at all — but it’s the kind of throughline that makes me want to keep paying attention to where I actually live, and who’s actually in it.
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