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Chris Strachwitz
Arhoolie Frontera Collection Chris Strachwitz, an avid music explorer, felt like
a visitor in a foreign world when he started collecting Mexican records
half a century ago. He had no music catalogs to guide him. No sales
charts or trade journals to consult in an industry at times as transient
as its migrant customers. Plus, he was a German immigrant and didn't
speak Spanish.
But Strachwitz had an ear for the grass-roots music he discovered in America - Cajun, country, gospel and the blues. And he heard a common quality in those rustic sounds of society's dispossessed, no matter what the language. "The first time I ever heard Mexican music was on a small station in Santa Paula, and I just loved it," says Strachwitz, owner of the respected folk music label Arhoolie Records. "God, it had this sound, and the way these two voices blended together. To me, that's the most soulful stuff I've heard. I mean, I heard it in blues. I heard it in hillbilly duet singing. It didn't sound to me all that different." Eventually, Strachwitz, had amassed what is now considered the world's largest collection of commercially recorded Mexican and Tex-Mex music, more than 100,000 individual performances spanning almost 100 years and numerous styles, from norteñas to boleros and rancheras. Experts say it's the most comprehensive repository of Mexican vernacular music anywhere, including Mexico.
The project is being funded primarily by the Los Tigres del Norte Fund at UCLA, named for the famed norteño group based in San Jose. Los Tigres, along with its record label, Fonovisa, established the fund to promote the study of the genre, historically disdained or dismissed on both sides of the border. By this summer, the public will have Internet access to the first phase of the project, all 16,000 78 rpm recordings from the first half of the 20th century. Each file includes a snippet of the song, an image of the record label and information about the record's creators, content and condition. So far, more than three-fourths of the digitized 78s are accessible at digital.library.ucla.edu/frontera. Still to come in the painstaking transfer process, depending on future financing, are Arhoolie's stockpile of 14,000 45s and 3,000 long plays, covering the 1950s through the 1990s. The collection contains rare recordings by major artists, such as legendary duo Los Alegres de Teran, Chicano music pioneer Lalo Guerrero, San Antonio accordion ace Santiago Jimenez and his son, Flaco, known for recent collaborations with guitarist Ry Cooder.
One of the most important items is one of the oldest.
The 1928 recording of "El Contrabando de El Paso" (The El
Paso Contraband), a Texas tale about liquor smuggling during Prohibition,
is considered one of the world's first narcocorridos, a precursor to
the border ballads about drug trafficking that would become so popular
half a century later. Although the song has been recorded dozens of
times over the years, experts say the composer had never been identified
- until now.
True to the tune's first-person narrative, the man who wrote it appears to have been the man who lived it. Last year, UCLA Spanish professor Guillermo Hernandez, author of an upcoming book about corridos, traced the events that inspired the song, which tells the story of a group of smugglers being taken by train from El Paso to the federal prison at Leaven worth, Kan. To access 78 recordings of all Mexican genres, click below in English or Spanish. In the search box enter Lydia Mendoza or Jose Alfredo Jimenez and you will be able to listen to a 50 sec recording, a picture of the record, and information such as label and date.
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