Chris Strachwitz, who traveled in the hunt for the roots of American music with the eagerness of a pilgrim, found conventional musicians with the ability 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, stated.
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 industry 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 elements 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 area hollers). In addition to recruiting his personal artists, he did his personal area 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 stated that having a household would have thwarted his profession. On his journeys across the nation to file 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 skills have been on the time principally unknown.
He emigrated from Germany after rising up as a teenage depend underneath 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 stated 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 kind of music negatively.
“It ain’t wimpy, that’s for certain,” he stated in a 2014 documentary about him. The movie took its title from Mr. Strachwitz’s final insult, which he used to discuss with something that he thought of business, synthetic and soulless: “This Ain’t No Mouse Music!”
The first Arhoolie file, 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 in the course of the Sixties people 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 file govt and a file collector, he made a significantly profound historic contribution to norteño, music from the Texas-Mexico border. The Smithsonian Institution final 12 months called his archive of Mexican and Mexican American music “the most important assortment of commercially produced vernacular recordings of its variety in existence,” noting that it contained many information which can be “irreplaceable.”
It was the results of about 60 years of accumulating — but Mr. Strachwitz by no means discovered to talk Spanish. Norteño musicians nicknamed him El Fanático.
Mr. Strachwitz may need been thought of 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 tradition into what’s now a full-blown renaissance.”
Perhaps his most notable discovery in Louisiana was Clifton Chenier, who turned often called the main exponent of the combo 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 file industry.
“They needed you to do what they needed you to do, and I didn’t like that,” Mr. Chenier said. “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 stated that Arhoolie’s second launch, “Tough Times,” an LP by the blues musician Big Joe Williams, “began me on a path of residing, the trail I’m nonetheless on.”
Christian Alexander Maria Strachwitz was born on July 1, 1931, in Berlin. He grew up on a rustic property referred to as Gross Reichenau, situated in what was then the Lower Silesia area of Germany (it’s now a village referred to 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 in the course of the time of Frederick the Great, the king of Prussia. The Nazis appointed Chris’s father an area sport warden, and through World War II he joined the navy and attained the rank of captain, although Hubert Strachwitz stated his service was restricted to escorting troop transports certain for Italy. On the household’s bucolic ancestral property, the conflict 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 prepare; 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 capable of 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 specific 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 instructed Mr. Strachwitz that he had discovered the bluesman in Houston. When the college 12 months ended, Mr. Strachwitz went on a street journey.
He later recalled that he discovered Mr. Hopkins taking part in in “a bit of beer joint” — improvising songs in a conversational type, 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 listen to poor Lightnin’ sing.”
Mr. Strachwitz believed that no one had ever recorded a scene like that stay. Following a tip from one in all 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, relatively than in a studio, turned Mr. Strachwitz’s signature type.
He discovered sudden 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 tools to file 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 file outlet he referred to as the Down Home Music Store.
Aside from recording music, he drew consideration to the artists he liked by collaborating with the filmmaker Les Blank on a number of music documentaries.
As the file industry declined, Mr. Strachwitz targeted on a nonprofit arm of Arhoolie that digitizes and displays his singular file 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 area. When he discovered an aged grasp of conventional music taking part in a track at a resonant time and place, he referred to as it, as if he have been searching butterflies, a “catch.”
Content Source: www.nytimes.com