Recordially Yours, Lou Curtiss (BlackStream Films, Cutting Room Floor, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, April 28) my husband Charles and I watched a quite compelling KPBS local documentary on one of the legends of San Diego’s music scene: Lou Curtiss, whom I first encountered at the Adams Avenue location of Folk Arts Rare Records in the early 1980’s when my then-partner Cat and I had just moved to Adams from Golden Hill. I stumbled on Folk Arts during one of my walks through the neighborhood and ultimately bought a few old 78’s there (notably Faye Adams’s “Shake a Hand” and Ruth Brown’s “So Long” and “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”). I also managed to stump Lou Curtiss when I mentioned I owned a bootleg LP of the Dorsey Brothers’ first recordings from 1928. His eyes lit up and he asked if he could borrow it so he could make a tape for himself. I agreed provided he’d write a cue sheet for it listing all the personnel on the various songs, which he did. The documentary was called Recordially Yours, Lou Curtiss and told the story of his life as well as his history as a collector and promoter of folk music, both live and recorded. It was directed by Yale Strom, whose other films include The Last Klezmer and American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs, along with his wife, Elizabeth Schwartz. Lou Curtiss was born July 2, 1939 in Seattle, but he grew up in San Diego and in the 1950’s used to do raids on thrift-store record racks with a good friend named Frank Zappa. Curtiss started building up a huge collection of rare 78 and 45 rpm recordings; like me in my earliest days, he had little use for rock ‘n’ roll but a great love of the musics from whence it came: African-American blues from the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s; traditional white bluegrass and hillbilly (which ultimately came together to form country music); and the pop music of the first three decades of the 20th century, including the crooners of the 1920’s. Curtiss sold his first record collection when his girlfriend at the time asked him to donate money to John F. Kennedy’s Presidential campaign in 1960. Then he inevitably started building it up again.

In the early 1960’s he moved to New York at the beginnings of the nascent folk-music scene in hopes of becoming a folk-music star himself, but his career went nowhere. Curtiss begged his parents for the money with which to return to San Diego, and in 1967 he opened Folk Arts Rare Records as a meeting place for people interested in roots music to come together and, almost incidentally, buy records of it. He married his wife Virginia in 1968 after she joined his folk-music group as a backup singer, and after its original locations at the foot of Washington and India Streets and later on Fifth Avenue in Hillcrest, Curtiss moved Folk Arts to a converted house on Adams Avenue. Curtiss did a regular radio show on the San Diego State University (SDSU) and also promoted folk-music concerts on the SDSU campus. For his opening one he lured the legendary bluegrass musician “Doc” Watson to headline. Once he settled in on Adams Avenue, Curtiss met up with the head of the Adams Avenue Business Association, who asked him to book the musical acts for the annual Adams Avenue Street Fair in the fall. Curtiss agreed as long as he could promote his own event in the spring, the Adams Avenue Roots Festival. (Today it’s called “Adams Avenue Unplugged” and Charles and I had just been to it the previous Saturday, April 26.) Curtiss prided himself on being able to book acts with major cult reputations even though most people outside the folk-music scene had never heard of them – including blues musician “Little Pink” Anderson, son of Pink Anderson, one of the two bluesmen (along with Floyd Council) from whom the band Pink Floyd got their name.

The film featured extensive interviews with Lou Curtiss himself – reportedly Strom and Schwartz started filming him in 2014, four years before his death – as well as his wife Virginia and many musicians who’d hung out at Folk Arts, played Curtiss’s street festivals, or otherwise interfaced with him. Among the names featured in the documentary are Mojo Nixon, Gregory Page, George Winston, Sue Palmer, Alison Brown, Tomcat Courtney, A. J. Croce (son of Jim Croce and his wife Ingrid), Tom Waits, and Jack Tempchin. You’ve probably never heard of Jack Tempchin but you’ve almost certainly heard “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” a song he wrote and sold to The Eagles via his friendship with Eagles co-leader Glenn Frey. (Tempchin wrote some other songs for The Eagles but “Peaceful Easy Feelings” was his biggest hit with them.) Lou Curtiss was an amazing man, and I’ll never forget the last time I saw him. It was at a brief relocation of Folk Arts to 3610 University Avenue (where it exists today; it’s run by Brendan Boyle, whom Curtiss personally chose to take it over and who’s featured in the film) and it was at an event that promised a rare chance to hear 1930’s blues legend Robert Johnson via an original pressing of one of his Vocalion 78’s. The announcement drew a crowd of people that might have made some people wonder whether Johnson himself had returned from the grave (he was murdered in 1938 by the jealous husband of a woman he was fooling around with) to give a concert. The record was ceremonially played and afterwards put back in its sleeve like a relic to be venerated. Lou Curtiss himself was there, though his wife and Brendan Boyle were running the event; he was seated behind the store’s counter and gave an unmistakable “not long for this world” vibe. Folk Arts had moved there when its landlord on Adams Avenue raised the rent unsustainably (which shocked me because I’d always assumed Lou Curtiss owned the location), but it’s nice to see it still going and still having the unmistakable wall decorations and various bits of clutter I remember from its Adams Avenue days. The film was well done and ran 67 minutes, and it took its title from the sign-off line Lou Curtiss almost always used to end his personal letters as well as his column in the folk-music newspaper San Diego Troubadour.