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  • This Ain’t No Mouse Music!: The Story of Chris Strachwitz and Arhoolie Records by Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon
  • Jennifer Joy Jameson
This Ain’t No Mouse Music!: The Story of Chris Strachwitz and Arhoolie Records. 2013. By Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon. 92 min. DVD format, color. (Sage Blossom Productions/Kino Lorber, Inc., New York, NY.)

“It’s because of him, that I’m here now,” explains southwest Louisiana musician Wilson Savoy, frontman of the Cajun and Creole ensemble The Pine Leaf Boys, at his family’s annual boucherie in Eunice. Savoy, who is son to Cajun music’s ambassadors, Marc and Ann Savoy, says that it took Chris Strachwitz’s rapt attention to his own Acadian traditions to begin to see the worth of his culture from the eyes of an outsider.

It is exactly this point that brings us to the thesis of Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon’s biographical documentary, This Ain’t No Mouse Music!, centered on Arhoolie Records’ colorful and oft curmudgeonly founder, Chris Strachwitz. Gosling and Simon, who co-produce and direct, are uniquely positioned to tell the story of the man behind Arhoolie, as both women were longtime collaborators with Arhoolie’s next-door neighbor and Strachwitz’s bosom buddy, the late documentary filmmaker Les Blank. Gosling and Simon (who studied folklore at UCLA) were along for the ride for several of Blank’s productions—many of which pulled regularly on the Arhoolie catalog—including Burden of Dreams, Gap-Toothed Women, Marc and Ann, and J’ai été au bal: The Cajun and Zydeco Music of Louisiana, assisting as producers, editors, and sound recordists.

The story of American music, and especially that of Southern music, is one that has been considerably influenced by the attention of cultural outsiders. In contemporary society, there is not a more prolific cultural outsider to evangelize the story and sounds of America’s traditional musical forms than Strachwitz. Born a German count, he fled Europe as a young man with his family during World War II and came of age in California. As a stateside teen, Strachwitz saw the 1947 musical drama New Orleans featuring Louis Armstrong and was transformed, forever in search of the “down-home” music that he holds so dear—jazz, gospel, hillbilly, Cajun, Tejano, country blues: “That, to me, was the music of paradise,” he recalls.

After collecting records and stepping out from school to frequent blues clubs, the Bay Area-based Arhoolie (an ode to a style of field holler) was born into the canon of archival and re-issue record labels when, in 1960, Strachwitz arranged with his late folklorist friend Mack McCormick to record the country bluesman Mance Lipscomb in his Navasota, Texas, kitchen. This session, true to Strachwitz’s style of capturing traditional music in situ, became the first recording of Lipscomb at the age of 65, and the first of many Arhoolie releases: ARH LP No. 1001, Texas Sharecropper and Songster.

Mouse Music walks the viewer seamlessly through the beginnings of the label, and then brings them back into direct contact with the voices and sounds Strachwitz has captured along the way, easily doubling as an abbreviated history to American traditional music. Viewers hear from the rural Texas blues of Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins, the border sounds of Norteño and conjunto artists like Lydia Mendoza and Flaco Jiménez, the Cajun and Creole music of Acadiana like the Savoys and Canray Fontenot, the New Orleans Dixieland jazz of the Tremé Brass Band, the urban-rural mix of Clifton Chenier’s rock-and-roll zydeco, and the country and bluegrass of Appalachia in the newer No Speed Limit. The viewer also encounters Woodstock-era folk acts influenced by traditional American music. Through a brief recording session with Country Joe and the Fish, Strachwitz unassumingly received half the publishing rights to their counterculture anthem [End Page 367] “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag.” The royalties from the tune served to jump-start Arhoolie productions and its accompanying record shop Down Home Music. It was partially the timing of Arhoolie’s growing catalog that supported this music. The folk revival of the 1950s and...

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