Chris Strachwitz, who traveled in the hunt for the roots of American music with the eagerness of a pilgrim, found conventional musicians with the talent of a detective, promoted their careers with the zeal of an ideologue and guarded their work with the care of a historian, died on Friday at an assisted residing facility in San Rafael, Calif. He was 91.
The trigger was congestive coronary heart failure, his brother, Hubert, mentioned.
Mr. Strachwitz (pronounced STRACK-wits) specialised in music handed down over generations — cotton-field music, orange-orchard music, mountain music, bayou music, barroom music, porch music. The songs got here not solely from earlier than the period of the music business however even from earlier than the existence of mass tradition itself.
Like different main musical folklorists of the fashionable recording period — amongst them Moses Asch, Alan Lomax and Harry Smith — Mr. Strachwitz rescued components of that historical past earlier than they vanished.
But the extent of his devotion and the idiosyncrasy of his passions defy comparability.
Mr. Strachwitz was the founding father of Arhoolie Records (the identify comes from a time period for subject hollers). In addition to recruiting his personal artists, he did his personal subject recordings, music enhancing, manufacturing, liner notes, promoting and gross sales. In the corporate’s early years, he affixed the labels to the information and mailed them himself.
He was a lifelong bachelor who mentioned that having a household would have thwarted his profession. On his journeys across the nation to report new music, he had for firm a operated by hand orange juicer and 20-pound baggage of oranges. The targets of his search included a freeway grass cutter, a gravedigger and a janitor, all of whose musical abilities had been on the time mainly unknown.
He emigrated from Germany after rising up as a teenage depend below Nazi rule and went on to discover the fullest reaches of American pluralism. He took an curiosity not simply in the usual roots repertory of folks and blues, but additionally in norteño, Cajun, zydeco, klezmer, Hawaiian metal guitar, Ukrainian fiddle, Czech polka and Irish dance music, amongst numerous different genres.
To account for what united his passions, Mr. Strachwitz mentioned he appreciated music that was “pure,” “hard-core” and “old-timey,” significantly if one of many musicians had a “spark.” His language grew extra colourful when he outlined his sort of music negatively.
“It ain’t wimpy, that’s for sure,” he mentioned in a 2014 documentary about him. The film took its title from Mr. Strachwitz’s final insult, which he used to confer with something that he thought-about business, synthetic and soulless: “This Ain’t No Mouse Music!”
The first Arhoolie report, launched in 1960, was “Texas Sharecropper and Songster,” by the blues singer Mance Lipscomb. Mr. Lipscomb’s music had by no means been recorded, and the brand new launch vaulted him into prominence throughout the Nineteen Sixties folks revival. Mr. Strachwitz went on to assist revive the careers of different blues singers, together with Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Big Mama Thornton.
As each a report govt and a report collector, he made a significantly profound historic contribution to norteño, music from the Texas-Mexico border. The Smithsonian Institution final 12 months known as his archive of Mexican and Mexican American music “the largest collection of commercially produced vernacular recordings of its kind in existence,” noting that it contained many information which might be “irreplaceable.”
It was the results of about 60 years of gathering — but Mr. Strachwitz by no means realized to talk Spanish. Norteño musicians nicknamed him El Fanático.
Mr. Strachwitz might need been thought-about a preservationist, however he additionally formed the worlds that he documented. That was significantly true of his recordings of Cajun musicians In 2000, the rock historian Ed Ward wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Strachwitz “helped prod the culture into what is now a full-blown renaissance.”
Perhaps his most notable discovery in Louisiana was Clifton Chenier, who turned often called the main exponent of the combination of rhythm and blues, soul and Cajun music often called zydeco. During a go to to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival as an older man, Mr. Chenier mentioned his frustrations with the report business.
“They wanted you to do what they wanted you to do, and I didn’t like that,” Mr. Chenier mentioned. “Then I met Chris.”
Mainstream musicians additionally noticed one thing distinctive in Mr. Strachwitz. In a 2010 profile of Mr. Strachwitz in The Times, the guitarist Ry Cooder mentioned that Arhoolie’s second launch, “Tough Times,” an LP by the blues musician Big Joe Williams, “started me on a path of living, the path I am still on.”
Christian Alexander Maria Strachwitz was born on July 1, 1931, in Berlin. He grew up on a rustic property known as Gross Reichenau, situated in what was then the Lower Silesia area of Germany (it’s now a village known as Bogaczow in southwest Poland). His father, Alexander Graf Strachwitz, and his mom, Friederike (von Bredow) Strachwitz, ran a vegetable and grain farm of a couple of couple hundred acres. The males of the household had the royal title of depend.
The household lived in a manor initially constructed throughout the time of Frederick the Great, the king of Prussia. The Nazis appointed Chris’s father a neighborhood sport warden, and through World War II he joined the navy and attained the rank of captain, although Hubert Strachwitz mentioned his service was restricted to escorting troop transports sure for Italy. On the household’s bucolic ancestral property, the struggle appeared distant to younger Chris.
That modified in February 1945. The household fled because the Russians invaded the property. Chris and two of his sisters had left shortly beforehand on a practice; his father escaped in a horse and buggy; Hubert, Chris’s different two sisters and his mom left on a tractor-trailer. Thanks to a rich relative within the United States, the household was in a position to reunite in Reno, Nev., by 1947.
Chris served within the U.S. Army from 1954 to 1956. Soon after being honorably discharged, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor’s diploma in political science. He taught highschool German within the suburbs of San Jose for a number of years.
In his free time, Mr. Strachwitz collected information, and he developed a selected curiosity in Lightnin’ Hopkins, whom he struggled to study extra about. There was no public details about whether or not Mr. Hopkins was even nonetheless alive.
In 1959, a fellow music fanatic informed Mr. Strachwitz that he had discovered the bluesman in Houston. When the varsity 12 months ended, Mr. Strachwitz went on a highway journey.
He later recalled that he discovered Mr. Hopkins taking part in in “a little beer joint” — improvising songs in a conversational fashion, telling a girl within the crowd to cool down, questioning in track in regards to the man from California who had traveled all the way in which to Texas “to hear poor Lightnin’ sing.”
Mr. Strachwitz believed that no one had ever recorded a scene like that dwell. Following a tip from certainly one of Mr. Hopkins’s songs, he returned to Texas the following 12 months and discovered Mr. Lipscomb. This time, he introduced a recorder.
Meeting musicians the place they lived and recording them the place they appreciated to play, moderately than in a studio, turned Mr. Strachwitz’s signature fashion.
He discovered surprising business success when Country Joe and the Fish carried out their “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” at Woodstock in 1969. Joe McDonald, the band’s lead singer and principal songwriter, had used Mr. Strachwitz’s gear to report the track again in 1965 and given him publishing rights in change. With his share of the royalties, Mr. Strachwitz put a down cost on a constructing in El Cerrito, Calif., close to Berkeley, that turned the house of Arhoolie and a report outlet he known as the Down Home Music Store.
Aside from recording music, he drew consideration to the artists he cherished by collaborating with the filmmaker Les Blank on a number of music documentaries.
As the report business declined, Mr. Strachwitz targeted on a nonprofit arm of Arhoolie that digitizes and reveals his singular report assortment. In 2016, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the nonprofit label of the Smithsonian Institution, acquired the Arhoolie catalog.
In addition to his brother, Mr. Strachwitz is survived by three sisters, Rosy Schlueter, Barbara Steward and Frances Strachwitz.
There was one phrase Mr. Strachwitz usually used to explain success in his subject. When he discovered an aged grasp of conventional music taking part in a track at a resonant time and place, he known as it, as if he had been searching butterflies, a “catch.”
Source: www.nytimes.com