Lydia Motion
Someone else who believed Lydia to have passed from this world is cartoonist/ 78-fetishist Robert Crumb. On his wonderful CD Hot Women (Kein & Aber), Crumb not only spells her name 'Lidya' but also writes "I believe she died sometime in the 1980s". If Crumb had called his old friend and Arhoolie Records founder Chris Strachwitz to check, he would have found that Lydia lives. As San Francisco was my US landing point, I made the call and gained an appointment to meet my roots music industry hero, Chris Strachwitz.
An elegant, silver-haired 73-year-old, Strachwitz has developed an adolescent passion for American roots music into a life's calling. Anyone interested in checking out the Arhoolie legacy should initially invest in The Journey Of Chris Strachwitz, Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Collection: 1960-2000. Across 5-CDs the Arhoolie box offers fabulous musical riches (Lightnin' Hopkins, Clifton Chenier, Flaco Jimenez. Big Joe Williams, Rose Maddox and, of course, Lydia), a huge smorgasbord of US roots music, and all the artists are produced by Chris. Sitting in his cramped office above Down Home Music (fab' roots music store), Strachwitz remains fired with enthusiasm for music while despondent about the state of the US body politic and its effect on American culture.
"After the Second World War, the working class got work in factories and pretty good money and they could support bands out of that. 50 years before that, people didn't have money to spend in nightclubs, but in the post-war years it was going ahead. And this raw energy was out there, so much great music was being made. You didn't have the huge difference between rich and poor; people made good wages, unions were strong. Now... now it's almost like slavery, it's disgusting; people working so hard just to earn a living wage and they've got them hooked on all this crap they want to sell them. The Anglo world is totally the same everywhere. San Francisco and Chicago are still unique because people live in them, but Houston and Dallas and cities like that are awful, completely deserted; people go and huddle in their yuppie areas and eat the same crap and drink the same wine and listen to new age crap. It's a completely soulless existence."