A Music Lover Down to His Roots (Published 2014)

THIS AIN’T NO MOUSE MUSIC!

Opens on Friday

Directed by Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon

1 hour 32 minutes; not rated

The musical anthropologist Alan Lomax would have adored “This Ain’t No Mouse Music!,” an engrossing documentary about Chris Strachwitz, the founder of and a producer for Arhoolie Records in El Cerrito, Calif. While the film covers Mr. Strachwitz’s life and times, it is mostly about the idioms he lives for: blues, zydeco, bluegrass, New Orleans jazz, norteño and other roots music. “It’s just got some guts to it,” he says. “It ain’t wimpy, that’s for sure. It ain’t no mouse music!”

Mr. Strachwitz, who came to the United States from Germany in 1947, idolized the bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins, whom he first saw in 1959 in Houston beer joints. In 1960, he founded Arhoolie (named after a variant on a field holler), releasing an album by the Texas singer-guitarist Mance Lipscomb. It was Hopkins who introduced Mr. Strachwitz to the zydeco giant Clifton Chenier, another Arhoolie star. Big money later arrived with royalties from, among other tunes, Country Joe and the Fish’s counterculture anthem “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag.”

Liberal screen time is devoted to “Chulas Fronteras,” a documentary about Mexican music that Mr. Strachwitz produced for the director Les Blank, and luminaries like Richard Thompson, Bonnie Raitt and Ry Cooder attest to Mr. Strachwitz’s passion and commitment. But it’s Arhoolie’s musicians — Big Mama Thornton, Flaco Jiménez, Michael Doucet of the Cajun band BeauSoleil and others — who are the true stars. I dare you not to tap your feet. ANDY WEBSTER