Chris Strachwitz, who traveled searching 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 dwelling 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 trade 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.
However the extent of his devotion and the idiosyncrasy of his passions defy comparability.
Mr. Strachwitz was the founding father of Arhoolie Information (the identify comes from a time period for discipline hollers). Along with recruiting his personal artists, he did his personal discipline recordings, music enhancing, manufacturing, liner notes, promoting and gross sales. Within the firm’s early years, he affixed the labels to the data 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 luggage 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 beneath 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 people 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 preferred music that was “pure,” “hard-core” and “old-timey,” notably 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 certain,” he mentioned in a 2014 documentary about him. The film took its title from Mr. Strachwitz’s final insult, which he used to seek advice from something that he thought-about business, synthetic and soulless: “This Ain’t No Mouse Music!”
The primary 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 through the Sixties folks revival. Mr. Strachwitz went on to assist revive the careers of different blues singers, together with Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Massive Mama Thornton.
As each a report govt and a report collector, he made a notably profound historic contribution to norteño, music from the Texas-Mexico border. The Smithsonian Establishment final 12 months known as his archive of Mexican and Mexican American music “the biggest assortment of commercially produced vernacular recordings of its type in existence,” noting that it contained many data which can be “irreplaceable.”
It was the results of about 60 years of accumulating — 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 notably true of his recordings of Cajun musicians In 2000, the rock historian Ed Ward wrote in The New York Occasions that Mr. Strachwitz “helped prod the tradition into what’s now a full-blown renaissance.”
Maybe his most notable discovery in Louisiana was Clifton Chenier, who grew to become often known as the main exponent of the combo of rhythm and blues, soul and Cajun music often known as zydeco. Throughout a go to to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Pageant as an older man, Mr. Chenier mentioned his frustrations with the report trade.
“They wished you to do what they wished 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 Occasions, the guitarist Ry Cooder mentioned that Arhoolie’s second launch, “Powerful Occasions,” an LP by the blues musician Massive Joe Williams, “began me on a path of dwelling, 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 known as Gross Reichenau, positioned in what was then the Decrease 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 boys of the household had the royal title of depend.
The household lived in a manor initially constructed through the time of Frederick the Nice, the king of Prussia. The Nazis appointed Chris’s father a neighborhood recreation warden, and through World Conflict II he joined the army and attained the rank of captain, although Hubert Strachwitz mentioned 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 practice; his father escaped in a horse and buggy; Hubert, Chris’s different two sisters and his mom left on a tractor-trailer. Due to a rich relative in the USA, the household was capable of reunite in Reno, Nev., by 1947.
Chris served within the U.S. Military from 1954 to 1956. Quickly after being honorably discharged, he graduated from the College 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 data, and he developed a specific curiosity in Lightnin’ Hopkins, whom he struggled to be taught 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 varsity 12 months ended, Mr. Strachwitz went on a highway journey.
He later recalled that he discovered Mr. Hopkins taking part in in “a bit beer joint” — improvising songs in a conversational fashion, telling a lady within the crowd to settle down, questioning in music concerning 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 person had ever recorded a scene like that stay. Following a tip from one among Mr. Hopkins’s songs, he returned to Texas the following 12 months and discovered Mr. Lipscomb. This time, he introduced a recorder.
Assembly musicians the place they lived and recording them the place they preferred to play, somewhat than in a studio, grew to become Mr. Strachwitz’s signature fashion.
He discovered surprising business success when Nation Joe and the Fish carried out their “I-Really 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 report the music again in 1965 and given him publishing rights in trade. Together with his share of the royalties, Mr. Strachwitz put a down fee on a constructing in El Cerrito, Calif., close to Berkeley, that grew to become the house of Arhoolie and a report outlet he known as the Down Residence Music Retailer.
Apart from recording music, he drew consideration to the artists he liked by collaborating with the filmmaker Les Clean on a number of music documentaries.
Because the report trade declined, Mr. Strachwitz centered 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 Establishment, acquired the Arhoolie catalog.
Along with his brother, Mr. Strachwitz is survived by three sisters, Rosy Schlueter, Barbara Steward and Frances Strachwitz.
There was one phrase Mr. Strachwitz typically used to explain success in his discipline. When he discovered an aged grasp of conventional music taking part in a music at a resonant time and place, he known as it, as if he have been looking butterflies, a “catch.”
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