15/05/2025
Sharing this post from the Arhoolie Foundation. Arhoolie Records has done amazing work recording and preserving American music. Blues legends from Mississippi Fred McDowell to Big Mama Thornton are a key part of the Arhoolie catalogue.
An important grant to help digitize the collections of Arhoolie founder Chris Strachwitz was recently terminated. The collection includes thousands of photos, hundreds of hours of video, and interviews and correspondence with artists.
With the current administration senselessly slashing the tiny percentage of government spending that funds art, science, history, and culture, it is up to us to keep projects like this alive for now.
Along with many organizations, we recently learned that our federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) was terminated. This grant had supported the digitization of the Chris Strachwitz Collection.
Federal agencies like the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services have provided crucial support for cultural preservation work. Over the past three years alone, we’ve received over $200,000 in matching grants from these agencies. In ways big and small, these projects have helped us pursue our mission to document, preserve, and celebrate American roots and tradition-based music.
In 2023, an NEH grant allowed us to process our collections and create finding aids to facilitate public access. In 2024, an NEA grant allowed us to offer eight $2,000 commissions to visual artists from the U.S.-Mexico border region for our Lydia Mendoza exhibit. And this past year, the IMLS grant has allowed us to digitize Chris Strachwitz’s papers and make them fully accessible online.
In terminating our grant, IMLS informed us that our project to digitize the Strachwitz Collection “no longer serves the interest of the United States.” This statement, which probably would have made Chris laugh, begs the question: Why do we do this work?
The simple and honest answer is that we love the music that Chris spent his life capturing: the music people make together in their homes, at church, and in clubs and bars and dance halls across this country. The late folklorist Archie Green called it vernacular music. Chris often called it down-home music. Whatever you call it, we’re driven by love for this music, its makers, and its documenters.
But we’re also proud stewards of an archive that preserves diverse voices and music traditions. We’re inspired by the example of Chris Strachwitz, who as a young, lanky German, ran headlong into deep and revelatory encounters with Black, Mexican, Creole, and southern white musicians, built lasting relationships of mutual respect with them, and who made it his life’s work to inject their music into a white cultural mainstream that usually ignored them. That spirit of cultural encounter, curiosity, and respect is the DNA of our work. As we continue to build on Chris’s work and share this archive with the world, we hope in some modest way to help us all—as Americans, as humans—understand each other a little bit better.
With the termination of federal funding, we need your support more than ever. We ask you to consider donating to the Arhoolie Foundation today (https://donorbox.org/donate-596). We have exciting projects on the horizon, from new collections and documentary fieldwork projects to artist grants and public programs. Without federal support, these projects become a lot harder to fund.
We also ask that you take action on behalf of museums, libraries, and archives like us by contacting your members of Congress and urging them to stand up for federal arts and culture funding (https://www.congressweb.com/aam/95/). Every email, phone call, and letter makes a difference. Thank you.
Image: Antonio Tanguma, Les Blank, and Chris Strachwitz, 1975. Photograph by Bruce Lane.
Note: In 2016, Smithsonian Folkways acquired the Arhoolie Records label and began distributing its catalog. The Arhoolie Foundation is a distinct non-profit organization based in California that is not involved in the distribution of Arhoolie Records.
