Traveling with pilgrim-like zeal in search of the roots of American music, Chris Strakwitz discovered traditional musicians with detective sleight of hand, furthered their careers with ideologue zeal, and became a historian. kept their jobs in the care of He died Friday at a San Rafael, Calif., nursing home. He is 91 years old.
Her brother Hubert said the cause was congestive heart failure.
Mr. Strakwitz (pronounced Strakwitz) specialized in intergenerational music: cotton field music, orange orchard music, mountain music, bayou music, bar music, porch music. These songs were born not just before the music industry, but before popular culture itself existed.
Like Moses Ashe, Alan Lomax, Harry Smith and other major ethnomusicologists of the modern recording age, Mr. Straqwitz has saved a piece of that history before it disappeared.
But the magnitude of his dedication and the specificity of his passion are incomparable.
Strakwitz was the founder of Urhooley Records (whose name comes from the term for field horror). 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 hinder his career. He carried a manual orange juicer and his 20-pound bag of oranges as he traveled around the country to record new music. His searches included highway mowers, gravediggers, and janitors, whose musical talents were basically 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, Zadeco, Klezmer, Hawaiian Steel his guitar, Ukrainian he fiddle, Czech polka, Irish dance his music, and a myriad of others. I was also interested in the genre of
Strakwitz said he likes “pure,” “hardcore,” and “outdated” music as a way to combine his passions, especially if one of the musicians has a “spark.” Negatively defining his own type of music, his diction became more colorful.
“Not wimpy, that’s for sure,” he said in the 2014 documentary. The film’s title was taken from Mr. Strachwitz’s ultimate insult, referring to anything commercial, contrived and soulless. “This is not mouse music!”
Arhoolie’s first record, released in 1960, was ‘Texas Sharecropper and Songster’ by blues singer Mance Lipscomb. Mr. Lipscomb’s music was never recorded, and new releases brought him to prominence during his 1960s folk revival. Strakwitz went on to help revive the careers of other blues singers, including Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Big Mama Thornton.
As a record business owner 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 is “the largest surviving collection of commercially produced local-language recordings of this kind” and contains many “irreplaceable” records. said.
Although it was the result of some 60 years of collecting, Mr. Strakwitz had never learned to speak Spanish. Norteño musicians nicknamed him El Juanatico.
Strackwitz may have been seen as a preservationist, but he also shaped the world he documented. That was especially true for Cajun musician recordings. In 2000, rock historian Ed Ward wrote in The New York Times that Strakwitz “has helped propel 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 you to do, 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 manor built during the time of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia. The Nazis appointed Chris’ father as a local hunting warden, and during World War II Chris enlisted in the army and earned the rank of captain, but according to Hubert Strahavitz, his duties were It was reportedly limited to escorting troop transports bound for Italy. In his family’s idyllic ancestral estate, war seemed far away to young Chris.
The situation changed in February 1945. The family fled as Russians invaded the property. Chris and her two sisters had just left by train. His father fled in a carriage. Hubert, Chris’ two other sisters, and their mother set off in a trailer. Thanks to wealthy relatives in the United States, the family was reunited in Reno, Nevada by 1947.
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. For several years he taught German at a high school outside of San Jose.
Mr. Straqwitz collected records in his free time and took a particular interest in Lightnin’ Hopkins and struggled to find out more about him. There was no public information as to whether Mr. Hopkins is still alive.
In 1959, a fellow music lover told Mr. Strakwitz that he had found a bluesman in Houston. After the school year, Strachwitz took a trip by car.
He later recalled finding Mr. Hopkins performing at a “little beer joint.” He improvised the song in a conversational style, told women in the crowd to be quiet, and wondered in the song about a man from California who had traveled all the way. Texas “to hear the poor Lightnin’ song”.
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. This time he brought me a recorder.
Meeting musicians where they lived, rather than in the studio, and recording where they liked to play became Mr. Straqwitz’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. In 1965, Mr. Straqwitz provided him with the equipment to record the song, in exchange for the rights to publish it. Strakwitz used a share of the rental fees to pay a down payment for a building in El Cerrito, California, near Berkeley, which would become Ahhooley’s home and his outlet for records called Down Home Music His Store.
Besides recording music, he has brought attention to the artists he loved by collaborating with filmmaker Les Blank on several music documentaries.
With the record industry in decline, Strachwitz turned to Arhoolie’s non-profit arm to digitize and showcase his only record collection. In 2016, the Smithsonian Institution’s non-profit label, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, acquired Ahhooley’s catalog.
In addition to his brother, Strackwitz is survived by three sisters: Rosie Schlueter, Barbara Steward and Francis Strackwitz.
There is a phrase that Struckwitz often used to describe his success in his field. When he found an elderly master of traditional music playing a song in a resonating time and place, he called it “Catch,” as if hunting butterflies.
