By LARRY ROHTER

EL CERRITO, California - The sign on the wall of the building that serves as the home of Arhoolie Records here, just north of Berkeley, promises “down home music,” and for 50 years, often operating on a tight budget, the label has delivered a rich and quirky mixture of blues, folk, jazz, Cajun, Tex- Mex, country, zydeco and gospel ? the full panorama of American roots music ? to an equally diverse collection of music fans.

John F. Kennedy had just been elected president when Chris Strachwitz, Arhoolie’s founder and still its owner, sat pasting pictures on the cover of the label’s first LP, “Mance Lipscomb: Texas Sharecropper and Songster.” Driving across the South a few months earlier, Mr. Strachwitz had recorded that blues singer at home, dreaming of giving up his job as a high school teacher but never imagining that his homespun venture would outlive some of the world’s largest recording conglomerates.

To commemorate its 50th anniversary, Arhoolie is about to release a four-CD collection of songs, ranging in style from the blues of Jesse Fuller to the free jazz of Sonny Simmons, that Mr. Strachwitz recorded between 1954 and 1970 in the San Francisco Bay area. Called “Hear Me Howling: Blues, Ballads & Beyond,” the package also includes a 136-page book that tells the history of the label.

Most of Mr. Strachwitz’s best-known recordings, though, are from the field, especially in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. That is where, starting in 1960, he found, recorded or helped revive the careers of seminal bluesmen like Bukka White, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Lipscomb, Mississippi Fred McDowell and even Clifton Chenier, the accordion- playing King of Zydeco.

For someone so devoted to American roots music, Mr. Strachwitz has an unusual background. Born in Germany in 1931 into an aristocratic family as Count Christian Alexander Maria Strachwitz, he spent his childhood under Nazi rule and came to the United States after World War II as a high school student living originally in Reno, Nevada.

From the start, he said, the variety of American music styles, especially their driving beat, enthralled him. “The rhythms haunted me,” he said. “I’d hear all this stuff on the radio, and it just knocked me over. ” For a generation of performers, from Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones to Bonnie Raitt and T Bone Burnett, Arhoolie has been a lodestone.

In his autobiographical “Chronicles Vol. I,” Mr. Dylan credits the label as being the place “where I first heard Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Charlie Patton and Tommy Johnson.”

The extensive liner notes on Arhoolie record s - many written by Mr. Strachwitz ? were a vital source of information. From recordings put out by Arhoolie, whose name comes from a Southern dialect term for a field holler, budding performers could learn about the instruments and tunings that performers used. “Every one of those records was a treasure,” said Ms. Raitt.

But Mr. Strachwitz is above all a collector. Though he does not speak Spanish, Mr. Strachwitz has built what is believed to be the largest private collection of Mexican-American and Mexican music, from mariachi and norteno accordion groups to corridos, with some recordings from as early as a century ago.

“That music had the same appeal to me that the hillbilly music did, this soulful country sound and a lot of duet singing,” he said. “And there was this weird mixture of string music with the trumpet filling in almost like a jazz musician, which I thought was just gorgeous.

” Mr. Strachwitz said one of his most gratifying moments was handing over a royalty check to Mississippi Fred McDowell after the Rolling Stones recorded his “You Gotta Move” in 1971 .

“I got tangled up being a sort of agent for some of them, for Fred and Mance and Lightnin’,” Mr. Strachwitz explained. Originally, he said, when he approached the Stones about royalty payments “their lawyers said ‘no, no, no, everything they record is their own stuff.’ ” But Mr. Strachwitz persisted.

“Fred was already suffering from cancer,” he said. “But I was very happy to be able to give him a check before he died.”