SAN DIEGO — Tom Waits and RuPaul. Joan Baez and Mojo Nixon.
Cartoonist Robert Crumb and Grammy Award-winning banjo virtuoso Alison Brown. New Age pianist George Winston and 2012 "American Idol" finalist Jessica Sanchez.
The singularly uncommon denominator that links these artists, and many more, was the tireless American roots-music champion Lou Curtiss.
For five decades, he owned and operated San Diego's Folk Arts Rare Records. Its many customers and fans included all of the people cited above.
The Seattle native — who died in 2018 at the age of 79 — is the subject of "Recordially Yours, Lou Curtiss," a long-gestating labor-of-love documentary by husband-and-wife filmmakers Yale Strom and Elizabeth Schwartz.
It premieres Friday at downtown San Diego's Digital Gym. The initial three-day run may be extended if the audience turnout is sufficient. For those wanting to learn more about this indefatigable musical force, whose impact extended far beyond San Diego, the film is a welcoming portal.
'Secrets of the universe'
"Lou Curtiss is a heroic curmudgeon, entrepreneur and keeper of the flame," Waits told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2003. "Folk Arts is a soul-food library and seed bank, much like the Library of Congress, where you go to light your torch. All the secrets of the universe are there ..."
Curtiss was a jack of many trades — all of them music-related. His passion for earthy American music styles was as boundless as his knowledge of them was encyclopedic. And he was always happy to share what he knew.
"Absolutely," said award-winning troubadour Gregory Page, who is featured in the film. He credits Curtiss as his musical adviser on each of the 20-plus albums Page has made since 1994.
"Lou was my mentor and Folk Arts was my school," Page said. "He shaped my knowledge of the nearly forgotten artists for whom he had such an extraordinary passion."
Curtiss was a producer, promoter and curator. His many credits included the San Diego Folk Festival (which he co-founded), the Balboa Park Banjo & Fiddle contest, the Adams Avenue Roots Festival (now known as Adams Avenue Unplugged) and myriad concerts, hootenannies and front-porch jam sessions. He was a welcome radio presence on KSDS-FM 88.3, which aired his weekly Sunday "Jazz Roots" show for two decades.
Curtiss was also a researcher and archivist for the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center. In 1991, England's Interstate Music Ltd. created the Country Routes Records label specifically to showcase his rare recordings by such seminal country and blues artists as Merle Travis, Bob Wills and Reverend Gray Davis. Curtiss worked hard to ensure royalties went to the estates of each artist.
"I just want to continue doing what I've done and continue to showcase old-time music of one kind of another," Curtiss said in a 2010 Union-Tribune interview. "It's what I love to do."
He and his now-retired biochemist wife, Virginia, were the driving forces behind the nonprofit San Diego Friends of Old Time Music. The couple, who wed in 1968, often played music together for the pure joy of it as a duo or with groups of musician friends.
Accordingly, "Recordially Yours" concludes with footage of the two — accompanied by such longtime pals as Patty Hall and Curt Bouterse — singing together on the front lawn of Folk Arts. Their delight in making music together is palpable.
"I'm so happy we ended the film with Lou and Virginia, his beloved wife, who was the wind beneath his sails," Strom said. "They are doing a humorous old-time novelty song, which he loved, and it really captures them."
Virginia Curtiss, who lives in El Cajon, agreed.
"If Lou was around now, I know he'd come to the premiere with me and our son, Ben," she said.
"Yale and Elizabeth started working on the film while Lou was still alive. Lou's main thing was to share the music and pass it around, so anything that would help do that — like this film — he would have enjoyed. He was sort of pleased with the idea Yale and Elizabeth were doing this."
Curtiss also shared his love of music as a longtime contributor to San Diego Troubadour, where his monthly "Recordially Yours" column was a constant highlight. He ran Folk Arts Rare Records — first in Mission Hills, then in Hillcrest and Normal Heights — from 1967 until 2014.
'Changed our lives forever'
During that time, Folk Arts was an invaluable resource and second home for myriad musicians, including Waits, Page, Jack Tempchin, the late Buddy Blue, AJ Croce, Sara Petite, Big Sandy and even the vinyl record-buying popcorn magnate Orville Redenbacher.
Curtiss encouraged them all, musicians and listeners alike. He happily introduced them to his treasure trove of rare recordings by pioneering and often underappreciated American roots music pioneers. He also showcased a significant number of those pioneers at his festivals here.
"Lou Curtiss brought the music he loved to so many people that would never have heard it and gave them the chance to fall in love with it. That changed all our lives forever," said Tempchin, whose songwriting credits include the Eagles' classics "Peaceful Easy Feeling" and "Already Gone."
Tempchin gave music lessons at Folk Arts in its early days. He and Waits wrote and performed several songs at the store, including "Folk Arts Baby" and "Tijuana." Both of them were inspired and awed by the earthy and exotic worlds of music Curtiss opened up for them. "Recordially Yours" pays heartfelt homage to the man and his legacy.
"There's no place better for your ears to eat than Lou and Ginny Curtiss' Folk Arts," Waits said in a 2014 Union-Tribune interview.
"From the Civil War to Moderno, from Beale Street (in Memphis) to Palermo (Italy), Folk Arts is the cupola, the chimney, the porch and the screen door — the soup kitchen for the lonesome traveler. Lou is the (pioneering musicologist Alan) Lomax of my years. Long may he swagger, long may he rule."
"Recordially Yours" is the fifth film producer Schwartz and director Strom have made together and Strom's 10th overall.
Strom became a fan of Curtiss as a young San Diego Folk Festival attendee, where — like Tempchin — he was mesmerized by the great bluegrass, country, folk, blues, ragtime, zydeco and Cajun artists that were featured. Strom and Schwartz co-lead Hot Pstromi, a freewheeling klezmer-music band that performed regularly at the Adams Avenue festivals Curtiss produced.
"We knew how important Lou was here," Schwartz said. "But what surprised us as we made this film was learning about people who would fly to San Diego, go to Folk Arts, ask Lou questions, buy records, then go back to Lindbergh Field and fly home."
One of those people is Brendan Boyle, who bought Folk Arts from Curtiss in 2014 and operates it now in North Park, a few miles from its previous location in Normal Heights. While living in Davis and in Iowa, Boyle would come to San Diego several times a year specifically to go to Folk Arts.
"I kept coming back," Boyle said. "And over time, I'd learn to ask Lou questions. If you asked him interesting questions about American roots music, Lou would tell you anything under the sun."
Singing out
The film includes interviews Strom and Schwartz shot with Curtiss in 2014 and clips from his "Jazz Roots" radio show. His life and work are also captured in interviews the couple shot with Tempchin, Brown, Page, Boyle, Hall, Bouterse, Croce, Nixon, San Diego Troubadour publishers Liz Abbott and Kent Johnson, boogie-woogie pianist Sue Palmer, and — full disclosure — this writer.
While most of the interview subjects are based in San Diego, Brown and Croce are both residents of Nashville, Tennessee. Nixon, who is himself the subject of a new film documentary, lives in Ohio.
"We were really fortunate to shoot all the interviews here in San Diego," Schwartz said. "We would have gone to Nashville to film Alison and AJ. But both of them came here during the pandemic to visit family so we were able to get them here. And Mojo was in town to play a gig at the Belly Up, so we filmed him in his hotel room.
"I have a little history with Lou," said Brown, whose recounting of that history in "Recordially Yours" is one of the film's most charming moments.
Equally memorable are the scenes in which Croce and Palmer, each seated at their respective pianos, pay tribute to Curtiss in words and music.
"Everyone we interviewed was so generous and they all wanted to sing Lou's praises. We were able to make this film through the generosity of so many people, not the least of which was the recently departed George Winston. He gave us hours of his time. So did all the musicians and historians we interviewed."
In addition to the new film by Strom and Schwartz, Curtiss' legacy will be documented in an upcoming Smithsonian Folkways Records box set.
The collection — also titled "Recordially Yours" — will feature live recordings from the San Diego Folk Festival, which Curtiss launched in 1967 with a headlining performance by bluegrass legend Bill Monroe.
"Smithsonian Folkways will be putting out this four-CD box set," Strom said, "and our film has already been booked to be screened at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C."
"Some people ask us: 'Why did you devote years to making a film about this guy with a little record store in San Diego?' And we say: 'Well, if the Smithsonian thinks he's important enough ...'."
"Lou was so important to the music world at large and to San Diego specifically," Schwartz said. "Our film and the Smithsonian box set both have the same name because they were both inspired by Lou and we're paying tribute to him."
Strom and Schwartz began laying the groundwork on "Recordially Yours" in 2012, two years before Curtiss and his wife sold Folk Arts to Boyle.
Curtiss signed all his correspondence "Recordially Yours." He, in turn, credited the phrase to a friendly record collector in the Bay Area who provided albums to Folk Arts on consignment. Curtiss later paid posthumous homage to that collector by adopting "Recordially Yours" as his own sign-off.
Peeved at Bob Dylan
Cordiality aside, Curtiss wasn't hesitant to voice his displeasure when warranted.
He reached out several times over the years to this writer to note that, while the city of San Diego provided financial support to some annual mainstream music festivals, it never allotted even a dollar of funding to his nonprofit San Diego Folk Festival or any of his subsequent musical endeavors.
Curtiss also contacted me in 1992 to lament that Bob Dylan's then-new solo acoustic album of weathered traditional folk songs, "Good as I Been to You," did not credit any of the songwriters.
"It would have really helped them get some exposure if Dylan had included their names," Curtiss said. "He should have. Why didn't he?"
But Curtiss was positively livid when, in 2009, he learned that members of such rock bands as My Morning Jacket and Bright Eyes had formed a group called Monsters of Folk.
These were not folk musicians, Curtiss informed me in no uncertain terms. Not only did they have no right to appropriate the word "folk," he continued, they should be ashamed that they did.
But discouraging words were rarely uttered within the walls of Folk Arts, where Curtiss spent his days absorbed in the songs and artists he devoted his life to extolling.
"I almost thought Lou's record shop was a fun excuse for him to go somewhere to listen to music and talk to people about it," recalled singer-songwriter Page.
"Any number of times, someone would come into the store, dig through the record bins and excitedly discover some rare old record with no price tag. They'd bring it up to Lou and he'd say: 'Oh, that's not for sale!' "
Page laughed at the memory.
"The four words I would say most often to Lou," he continued, "were: 'Lou, who is this?' Because every time I walked into Folk Arts, he'd be playing music I had never heard before.
"Lou's passion for preserving music from a vital era was essential to the future. I really miss our friendship and our time spent together listening. We never spoke that much. We had conversations, but mostly it revolved around deep listening.
"My takeaway was to go out into the world and share the insights he's given me. And I've done that at my concerts in The Netherlands, England, Australia and points in between. Lou provided me and so many other musicians his knowledge and information to share. That's his greatest legacy."
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'RECORDIALLY YOURS, LOU CURTISS'
When: Opens Friday
Where: Digital Gym, 1100 Market Street, downtown
Tickets: $9-$12
Phone: (619) 230-1938
Online: digitalgym.org
