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Traveling in search of the roots of American music with a pilgrim’s zeal, Chris Strachwitz discovered traditional musicians with his detective dexterity, promoted their careers with an ideological zeal, and cared for historians. kept their jobs. He died Friday at a nursing home in San Rafael, Calif. He was 91 years old.
His brother Hubert said the cause was congestive heart failure.
Strachwitz (pronounced STRACK-wits) specializes in music that has been passed down through the generations: cotton field music, orange orchard music, mountain music, bayou music, tavern music, porch music. I’m doing it. Songs were born not only before the age of the music industry, but even before popular culture itself existed.
Like other major ethnomusicologists of the modern recording age, such as Moses Ashe, Alan Lomax, and Harry Smith, Mr. Strakwitz has rescued a piece of that history before its demise.
But the degree of his dedication and the idiosyncrasy of his passion are beyond compare.
Mr. Strachwitz was the founder of Arhoolie Records (the name comes from the term for field haulers). In addition to recruiting his own artists, he also did field recording, music editing, production, liner notes, advertising and sales himself. In the early days of the company, he labeled records and mailed them himself.
He said he was single all his life and that having a family would ruin his career. I had it in my company. His searches included highway mowers, gravediggers, and janitors, all of whose musical talents were essentially unknown at the time.
After growing up as a teenage count under Nazi rule, he emigrated from Germany and continued to explore the limits of American pluralism to the fullest. He draws from the standard roots of folk and blues in his repertoire, as well as Norteño, Cajun, Zydeco, Klezmer, Hawaiian Steel, his guitar, Ukrainian fiddle, Czech polka, Irish dance music and countless others. I was also interested in other genres.
To explain what united his passions, Strackwitz said he likes “pure,” “hardcore,” and “old-school” music, especially if one of the musicians has a “spark.” Told. As he defined his own type of music negatively, his language became more colorful.
“It’s certainly not wimpy,” he said of him in a 2014 documentary. It refers to anything that you consider to be without. “This is not mouse music!”
The first Urhooley record released in 1960 was “Texas Sharecropper and Songster” by blues singer Mance Lipscomb. Lipscomb’s music had never been recorded before, but this new release catapulted him to prominence during his 1960s folk revival. Mr. Strakwitz went on to help revive the careers of other blues singers, including Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Big Mama Thornton.
As both a record executive and record collector, he made a particularly deep historical contribution to Norteño, the music of the Texas-Mexican border. The Smithsonian Institution last year called his archive of Mexican and Mexican-American music “the largest collection of commercially produced indigenous recordings of its kind in existence”, noting that many of the “irreplaceable” records I pointed out that it was included.
It was the result of some 60 years of collecting, but Strakwitz had never learned Spanish. Norteño musicians nicknamed him El Fanatico.
Strackwitz may have been seen as a conservationist, but he also shaped the recorded world. In 2000, rock historian Ed Ward wrote in The New York Times that Strakwitz “helped push culture into its current full-fledged renaissance.”
Perhaps his most notable discovery in Louisiana was Clifton Chenier, who came to be known as the leading authority on the mix of rhythm & blues, soul, and Cajun music known as zydeco. Visiting the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival as an older man, Shenia spoke of his frustration with the record industry.
“They wanted you to do what they wanted, and I didn’t like that,” Chenier said. “Then I met Chris.”
Mainstream musicians also saw something special in Mr. Strackwitz. In a 2010 Times profile of Mr. Struckwitz, guitarist Ry Cooder said that Ahhooly’s second release, blues musician Big Joe Williams’ LP Tough Times, was me. I started walking the way I live, that is, the way I am. in the process of. “
Christian Alexander Maria Strakwitz was born on July 1, 1931 in Berlin. He grew up in a country estate called Reichenau, then Lower Germany, in the Silesian region (now a village called Bogachev in southwestern Poland). His father, Alexander His Graff He Strachwitz and his mother, Friederike (von Bread) Strachwitz, operated a vegetable and grain farm of about 200 acres. A man in the family held the royal title of count.
The family lived in a mansion built during the time of the Prussian King Frederick the Great. The Nazis appointed Chris’ father to be the local hunting supervisor, and during World War II he joined the army and earned the rank of captain, but Hubert Strachwitz said his assignment was for a trip to Italy. In the family’s idyllic ancestral lands, war seemed distant to young Chris.
That changed in February 1945. The family fled because the Russians invaded the estate. Chris and her two sisters were on a train just before they left. His father escaped by horse and buggy. Hubert, Chris, his other two sisters, and his mother set off in the tractor his trailer. Thanks to wealthy relatives in the United States, the family was able to reunite by her 1947 in Reno, Nevada.
Chris served in the US Army from 1954-1956. Soon after he was honorably discharged, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He taught German at a high school outside of San Jose for several years.
In his spare time, Mr. Strakwitz collected records and took a particular interest in Lightnin’ Hopkins. It has not been made public whether Hopkins is still alive.
In 1959, a fellow music lover told Mr. Strakwitz that he had found a bluesman in Houston. At the end of the school year, Mr. Strakwitz went on an expedition.
He later recalled finding Mr. Hopkins playing in a “little beer joint.” He improvises a song in a conversational style, telling the women in the crowd to be quiet as he muses about this man all the way from California. Texas “To hear poor Lightnin’ sing”
Strackwitz believed that no one had recorded such a scene live. Following Mr. Hopkins’ hint in the song, he returned to Texas the following year and found Mr. Lipscomb. Bring a recorder this time.
Meeting musicians where they lived and recording where they liked to play rather than in the studio became Mr. Strahawitz’s signature style.
He achieved unexpected commercial success in 1969 when Country Joe and the Fish performed “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” at Woodstock. Joe McDonald, the band’s lead singer and principal songwriter, said Mr. Straqwitz provided him with the equipment to record the song in 1965, and gave him the publishing rights in return. With a share of the royalties, Mr. Strakwitz paid for a down payment on a building in El Cerrito, Calif., near Berkeley. The building became Ahhooley’s home base and record store, which he dubbed “Down Home Music Store”.
Besides recording music, he has also brought attention to the artists he loves by collaborating with filmmaker Les Blank on several music documentaries.
With the recording industry in decline, Strakwitz focused on Ahhooley’s non-profit arm, which digitized and showcased his idiosyncratic record collection. In 2016, the Smithsonian Institution’s non-profit label, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, acquired Arhoolie’s catalog.
In addition to his brother, Mr. Strackwitz is survived by three sisters: Rosie Schlueter, Barbara Steward and Francis Strackwitz.
There was one word that Struckwitz often used to describe his success in his field. When he found an old virtuoso of traditional music playing the tune in a time and place that resonated, he called it “catch” as if he were hunting butterflies.
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