(FORTUNE Small Business) – For 45 years Chris Strachwitz has been driving the back roads of rural America in search of unknown blues and folk artists. In 1960 he discovered the singing ex-sharecropper Mance Lipscomb cutting grass in Navasota, Texas. Several years later he introduced blues legend Lightnin' Hopkins to mainstream audiences. Since then Strachwitz has released hundreds of records through his Arhoolie label, based in El Cerrito, Calif. ("Arhoolie" comes from an old Mississippi field holler.) In 2000, Arhoolie won a Grammy for The Journeys of Chris Strachwitz, a five-CD boxed set that surveys North American music from bluegrass to zydeco.

Strachwitz, 73, recently plunged into his archive of Mexican popular music and emerged with Roots of the Narcocorrido, a collection of folk ballads (corridos) about the exploits of contraband smugglers along the U.S.-Mexican border. The November release traces the genre from its 19th-century origins to the modern narcocorridos, which often romanticize drug smugglers as heroic Robin Hood figures. Along the way we get a wealth of remastered gems from Strachwitz's collection of old Mexican 78s: Prohibition-era songs about tequila smugglers, romantic sketches of underworld life in Ciudad Juárez during the mid-1930s, and much more.

The characters in the songs bear little resemblance to the violent, sleazy reality of drug smuggling. But the CD does give an alternative view of the U.S. war on drugs, and reminds gringos that there's more to Mexican music than the grinning mariachis of Tex-Mex restaurant hell. —RICHARD MCGILL MURPHY