Bruce "Utah" Phillips
Congress's loss was the Folk world's gain. In 1968, pacifist rabble rouser and organizer
Bruce Phillips ran for the U.S. Senate as a candidate of Utah's Peace and Freedom Party.
Though he pulled several thousand votes, a good showing for a third party candidate, he
finished well behind the incumbent, Republican Wallace F. Bennett. After the election,
Phillips found himself unemployable in Utah due to his radical views. Needing money to
finance his next campaign, he headed to New York City to sell his songs and finance his
next campaign.
A visit to Caffé Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York changed his plans. Fellow Utah songwriter
Rosalie Sorrels had introduced some of Utah's songs to audiences in the Northeast and invited
him to perform at the Club. With Sorrels' encouragement, Phillips began to perform professionally
and tour the coffeehouse circuit of the 1970s. Though Phillips gave up his senatorial ambitions,
he has never stopped campaigning for peace and justice. He received a lifetime achievement award
from the Folk Alliance in 1997.
Bruce "U.Utah" Phillips was born in 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio to a family of radicals and labor
organizers. His parents split up when he was in his early teens and he moved with his mother and
stepfather to Utah. Unhappy with his new family, Phillips ran away from home, hopping trains,
working odd jobs, travelling around the country and learning stories, history and music from the
people he met. A fan of country artists Hank Snow, Roy Acuff and T. Texas Tyler (after whom he
took the name U. Utah Phillips), he learned to play the guitar and began writing songs about the
hobo life while supporting himself as a printer, dishwasher, and stock clerk. Following his
parents radicalism, he joined the International Workers of the World, working as an organizer
for them.
Broke and depressed, Phillips joined the Army in 1956, hoping to learn a trade. He was sent to
Korea where he served three years, coming back more depressed than before he left. He was quoted
by interviewer Rik Palierei in Sing Out Magazine: "I wanted to learn a trade, but all they
taught me was how to shoot... What I really learned in the army was how to be a pacifist."
Phillips returned to the states following his tour of duty and went back to tramping around and
riding the rails. He returned to Salt Lake City where he encountered the Joe Hill House mission
and its founder, the anarchist, pacifist priest Ammon Hennacy. Hennacy helped Phillips straighten
himself out personally and honed Phillips's radicalism. As a result of Hennacy's teachings,
Phillips founded the Poor Peoples' Party (later merged with the Peace and Freedom Party) and
launched his senate campaign.
Since becoming a full time entertainer, Phillips has toured venues and festivals across the
country sharing political songs, union songs, songs of the west and stories. He has recorded
several albums on his own and two award winning story collections with modern-day radical
musician Ani DiFranco. Though limited by illness, Phillips still performs on a limited basis
and until recently hosted a syndicated radio show called "Loafers Glory". He currently lives
and rants in Nevada City California.
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Chris Strachwitz
Chris Strachwitz, founder and president of Arhoolie Records, is first and foremost an
enthusiastic fan of all sorts of folk, traditional and ethnic roots music, old and new.
He has traveled to obscure places to record both obscure and famous musicians performing
their "vernacular music," as he describes it. He has reissued classic recordings of
yesteryear that were in danger of disappearing into oblivion, and he has introduced those
sounds to new audiences twice: first on vinyl, then again in the 1990s by re-releasing
many Arhoolie albums via compact disc. In his roles as archivist, historian, educator,
and film producer, his importance to the world of folk music is immeasurable and, accordingly,
he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance at the 1997 Folk Alliance
conference.
The German-born Strachwitz was a teenager when he moved with his family to California in 1947.
Shortly thereafter, Chris became mesmerized by the sounds of hillbilly, blues, and ethnic music
on the radio. It didn't take long for him to collect hundreds of 78 rpm records and to become
fascinated with the recording process.
Strachwitz finished college and became a schoolteacher, but never lost his interest in music or
in making records. He bought recording equipment and learned more about the recording process
from R&B legend Bob Geddins in the late 1950s. Chris's dream was to record blues guitarist
Lightning Hopkins, but he had no idea where Hopkins lived. Strachwitz's friend, musicologist
Sam Charters, located Hopkins in Houston in 1958, and Chris says that discovery "was like the
opening of the pearly gates."
He met his blues hero the next year, and by the summer of 1960, Strachwitz finally made the
trek to Texas to record the blues. Although Chris didn't get to make records with Hopkins during
that trip, his 1960 foray throughout Texas led to recordings from the likes of African-American
blues masters Mance Lipscomb, Black Ace, and Lil' Son Jackson. These classic blues albums, and
others Strachwitz made in the following years, helped fuel the blues revival of the 1960s.
Arhoolie Records was officially born on November 3, 1960, when Strachwitz and some friends sat
around his kitchen table and inserted 250 copies of a Mance Lipscomb LP in the album jackets.
The label's name, suggested by Strachwitz's friend Mack McCormick, means a field holler in the
rural South. Strachwitz struggled by for a few years until he happened to record local California
folkies Country Joe and the Fish singing their "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag." Strachwitz
recorded the song in exchange for the publishing rights. As the song entered American popular
culture and appeared in the movie Woodstock, Strachwitz found himself financially healthy enough
to keep issuing obscure ethnic recordings.
During the 1960s Arhoolie also recorded cajun and zydeco music, becoming one of the first
non-local labels to issue Louisiana French music. Arhoolie material by Cajun legends such
as the Hackberry Ramblers, and Nathan Abshire with the Balfa Brothers, as well as the Arhoolie
recordings of the King of Zydeco, accordionist Clifton Chenier, often reflects the down home,
ebullient personality of not just the music makers, but of Chris Strachwitz himself. Strachwitz'
work to preserve and promote the musical traditions of Louisiana was both exceedingly timely and
vitally important, coming at a time when cajun culture was at low ebb and in real danger of
disappearing.
As Arhoolie Records grew throughout the 1960s, '70s and '80s, so did its repertoire. Strachwitz
released blues and cajun material recorded in the south during the late '50s by folklorist Harry
Oster. Arhoolie also secured the licensing rights to, and reissued, many classic recordings made
from the 1920s to 1960s covering a wide range of styles including Ukrainian-American fiddling,
calypso, flamenco, old-time, Greek rembetika, and, of course, the music of Mexico and
Mexican-Americans.
Chris Strachwitz is responsible for making available some of the finest recordings of
Texas-Mexico border music recorded over the past 70 years. Arhoolie's output runs the gamut from
reissues of seminal conjunto squeezeboxers from the 1930s, post World War II Tejano orquestras,
and classic mariachi bands to newer, original albums from musicians like Flaco Jimenez and "The
Meadowlark of the Border," Lydia Mendoza.
Strachwitz covers all the bases in his continuing search for new, vibrant music. He has
personally recorded or produced new gems by important performers of earlier times like Mendoza,
Creole fiddler Canray Fontenot, and hillbilly boogie matriarch Rose Maddox. Throughout the years,
his Arhoolie albums have introduced to a large audience the incredible sounds of zydeco king
Chenier, top Cajun band Beausoleil, and prominent conjunto-accordionist ambassador-to-the-world
Flaco Jiménez. Recent Arhoolie recordings have featured other excellent, but lesser-known,
roots music artists like Venezuelan vallenato-style accordionist Ivan Cuesta, Afghani lute player
Aziz Herawi, and Los Conzontles, a Mexican-American youth group based at a neighborhood cultural
center near Arhoolie's home of El Cerrito, California.
Strachwitz' interest in experiencing the lifeblood of vernacular music first-hand has taken him
into the field on many occasions. Two visual fruits of his travels are the highly-praised 1976
documentary films on Mexican-American border music, Chulas Fronteras and Del Marco Corazón,
filmed by Les Blank, produced and with the sound recorded by Strachwitz. In another film
collaboration with Blank, this time in the late 1980s, Strachwitz produced J'ai Eté Au Bal
(I Went to the Dance), the definitive documentary on cajun and zydeco music.
When Chris Strachwitz supervises a recording session, he strives to capture the intangibles that
make the music special. In the liner notes to blues pianist Katie Webster's Arhoolie album I
Know That's Right, co-producer John Lumsdaine says "Making the record was a fast, wild ride as
it often is recording with Chris! ... recording in the old down home style, everything done
live .. we'd do maybe two takes ... We'd hold onto our hats and try a run. It was a classic
Chris session, all love, feel and contagious energy."
And when Chris Strachwitz tells stories about the music he loves and his travels to find
musicians in out-of-the-way places, he always radiates an aura of enthusiasm and vitality,
a spirit driven by the vibrancy and spontaneity he finds in vernacular roots music. The
recordings bearing the Arhoolie label are a treasure trove of sound that will preserve and
promote roots music traditions and thrill and entertain us for a long time to come
In 1995, Strachwitz created the Arhoolie Foundation, a non-profit foundation that helps to
document, present, and disseminate authentic traditional and regional vernacular music. Arhoolie
records celebrated their 40th anniversary in the year 2000, releasing a 5- CD collection with
an accompanying 68 page book, written by Elijah Wald. The package received a Grammy award for
Best Album Notes.
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