ARHOOLIE FOUNDATION COLLECTIONS:Audio Interviews
Audio interviews by Chris Strachwitz during his research into the music he was recording for his label Arhoolie Records as well as for his radio programs on KPFA-FM (Berkeley, CA) in the 1960’s through 1980’s, and by Dr. Manuel Peña during his research for his several books on Mexican American music.
Tejano Musician Andres Berlanga
“I started playing guitar, I didn’t know nothing about guitar, I was hard labor man working on construction and all that then I come to think, this man can do it I guess I can do it too and I tried it and I tried it and I got on it.”
Listen HereArmando Marroquín Interview – Tejano
Armando Marroquín will always be known as the man who founded the tejano recording industry. A native of Alice, Texas, where he spent his entire life, Marroquín was born in 1912, and he died in 1990.
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share: [feather_share] Luis Acosta Interviewed by Chris Strachwitz Date: May 19, 1974 Language: English Instrument maker, A&R man in San Antonio in the 1930s. Moses...
Listen HereBalde Gonzalez Interview
Baldemar (Balde) González was born on May 30, 1928, in Beeville, Texas. Sightless since birth, he attended the school for the blind in Austin, Texas, where he learned to play piano, clarinet and saxophone.
Listen HereBlues Musician Big Joe Williams Interview 1960
Born in Oktibbeha County, Mississippi in 1903, Joe Lee “Big Joe” Williams is a renowned blues musician known for his use of a nine-string guitar. He talks to Chris about making his living traveling with medicine shows, playing with a young Muddy Waters, and making records.
Listen HereSacred Steel Archive: Elton Noble Interview
I met Elton Noble in the early 1990s, when he was learning the House of God, Keith Dominion steel guitar tradition from Aubrey Ghent, under the Florida Folklife Program’s Apprenticeship Program, which I coordinated. Today, Elder Nobel is a talented steel guitarist and a compelling preacher who serves as pastor for House of God No. 2 in Fort Pierce, Florida, and is in high demand as a guest speaker at revivals and other large church meetings throughout the geographic range of the House of God.
Listen HereSacred Steel Archive: Chuck Campbell Interview
A resident of Rochester, New York when we met in 1996, Chuck Campbell was one of the first steel guitarists from outside Florida I documented. As a pioneering pedal-steel guitarist in the House of God who possesses a solid knowledge of music theory, he led the way in incorporating the pedal-steel guitar into the House of God musical tradition, which the non-pedal or “lap” steel guitar had dominated for decades.
Listen HereSacred Steel Archive: Willie Eason Interview
As a teenager, Willie Eason learned to play the steel guitar by watching his older brother, Troman, who took lessons in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from a Hawaiian musician he heard on a radio broadcast circa 1937.
Listen HereSacred Steel Archive: Robert Stone Biography
The Robert Stone Archive: Robert Stone Biography Bob Stone is an independent folklorist and photographer based in Gainesville, Florida. During his tenure with the Florida Folklife...
Listen HereBill Neely Interview
Bill Neely has been singing and picking guitar since 1929 when Jimmie Rodgers showed him a few basics. In the late 1940s he started writing his own songs and has been doing it ever since. The songs on this, Bill’s first album, are almost all his own compositions.
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