Chris Strachwitz was 16 and had arrived in America from Germany after World War II not speaking a word of English. He landed in Reno, where his only friend was the radio, carrying a border station out of Mexico. By the time he was fluent in English, he was also fluent in American vernacular music, and he turned that into his life’s work by establishingArhoolie Recordsin El Cerrito in 1960.
Sixty-three years later, Arhoolie Records and its retail outlet Down Home Music still exist as a mecca for exploring roots, country blues, zydeco, Cajun and Mexican American music, and Strachwitz is credited with preserving and promoting obscure styles that might have been lost in the recordings made in homes, garages and churches. Strachwitz, who never stopped promoting, listening to and taking pictures of artists he discovered or rescued, was stopped by congestive heart failure.
He died May 5 at an assisted living facility in San Rafael, where he had spent his last week in bed with a constant stream of musicians coming by to play for him one last time. There was also a tribute to him at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, where a panel discussion spent an hour talking about him, with Strachwitz listening in by Zoom link. He died later that night, said John Leopold, managing director of theArhoolie Foundation, which promotes and preserves American roots music. He was 91.
“No one has meant more to the preservation and appreciation of Americana roots music than Chris Strachwitz,” singer-guitarist Bonnie Raitt writes in “Arhoolie Records’ Down Home Music: The Photographs and Stories of Chris Strachwitz,” to be published in October by Chronicle Books.
Joel Selvin采访Strachwitz Ho在下来me Music and some favorite Mexican restaurants so he could contribute to the book, called Strachwitz “this big goofy German guy who took so much pleasure in ethnic musicians that he was completely nonthreatening. He could make himself comfortable among the blues singers in the Houston ghetto, the Cajun singers in the Bayou, the hillbillies in the Appalachians, and the conjuntos of San Antonio.”
This unassuming style led to more than 400 albums on the Arhoolie label, with musicians from everywhere finding their way to hisDown Home Music Store埃尔塞里托转换家具商店的San Pablo Avenue. There were record release parties, holiday parties and sidewalk record swaps that included 78 rpm shellacked 10-inch records from his own collection, which is so big it is maintained in a separate building he had constructed on the parking lot.
His birthday party, held on July 4, brought in enough talent to keep his in-store stage going all day into and into the night.
“It is a folk music empire,” said Selvin, a former Chronicle music critic. “He ran a record store, a distributorship and a film production company.”
Much of it was financed by a recording by a Berkeley jug band that Strachwitz made in his living room in 1965. The band was to become Country Joe and the Fish, and one of the songs was “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” which gained nationwide fame as an anthem of the anti-Vietnam War movement and was featured in the “Woodstock” film and soundtrack.
Strachwitz got the publishing rights to the song, which meant he collected a fee every time the song was played on the radio, on television and in the movies.
他也记录了“你必须移动”of undiscovered bluesman Fred McDowell. Guitarist Keith Richards somehow heard it and covered the song on the Rolling Stones’ ‘Sticky Fingers’ album. That’s how Strachwitz came to deliver a five-figure royalty check to McDowell’s home in Como, Miss.
Richards never made it to Arhoolie, but Ry Cooder, Linda Ronstadt and Steve Miller did, among others. When Strachwitz met Elvis Costello at a restaurant in New Orleans, Costello gushed, “I’m so honored to meet you. I’m a huge fan,” when for others it would have been the other way around.
That’s the power he had. “Strachwitz is renowned in the music world as the beacon of integrity,” Selvin said. “All his records are pure and authentic. It is naked, honest, genuine music. Chris was a major figure.”
Christian Alexander Maria Strachwitz was born July 1, 1931, in Gross Reichenau, Germany, an area that is now part of Poland. His family was aristocratic and after World War II it fled through Sweden and eventually landed in Reno. Strachwitz was sent to board at the Cate School in Santa Barbara, where he discovered Tex-Mex, hillbilly, Cajun, New Orleans jazz, country blues and R&B. Everything that was considered pop he came to dismiss as “mouse music.”
While at Cate he set up a pirate radio station to introduce fellow students to the unvarnished music he loved. After graduating from Cate, he enrolled at Pomona College but transferred to UC Berkeley, graduating in the late 1950s. By then he was hauling around a huge record collection and a reel-to-reel tape recorder.
“I am in, a way, a diplomat for the music,” he said during a 2014 interview with The Chronicle, timed to the release of a documentary film about his life titled “This Ain’t No Mouse Music.”
As the interview noted, walking from the front door of Down Home Music to find the shopkeeper at his storefront in back was like walking from Houston up through Louisiana and Mississippi to Nashville, musically speaking.
To get there, Strachwitz’s journey went through both Los Gatos High School and Saratoga High School, where he managed to teach German by playing old American blues records. His destiny as an educator was as a musicologist, and after leaving his teaching job he loaded his reel-to-reel recorder in an old Plymouth and drove south in search of the country blues, in the manner of the pioneering folklorist John Lomax.
In those days, you did not call ahead to make an appointment, and it was hit-and-miss. Strachwitz later noted that at the precise moment, he was driving to Texas in search of the country blues singer Lightnin’ Hopkins, Hopkins himself was driving to Berkeley to perform.
That was a missed opportunity but he landed Mance Lipscomb, recorded in his living room by Strachwitz. That was the first release on Arhoolie Records, which Strachwitz named after a field holler. That record, “Mance Lipscomb: Texas Sharecropper and Songster,” was released in 1960 in a pressing of 250 records. One of them now belongs to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry.
It never paid much, but “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag’’ did. The publishing rights made enough to finance the opening of Down Home in El Cerrito, which was to serve as anchor for his many musical pursuits.
One of them was KPFA-FM in Berkeley, where for three decades, starting in the 1960s, he hosted a Sunday afternoon music show titled simply “Jazz, Blues and Folk.”
“I respected Chris for his fanatical love of all of the music he tracked down for all those years and brought to all of us through his field recording ways,” said Bonnie Simmons, whose own freeform music show on Thursday nights often plays what Strachwitz would have dismissed as mouse music. “We wouldn’t have access to Clifton Chenier, Flaco Jimenez and Mississippi Fred McDowell without Chris and the extraordinary library that he put together over more than 50 years.”
In 1995, Strachwitz created the Arhoolie Foundation to protect his vast collection of vinyl records. The foundation then partnered with UCLA to digitize the collection of music recorded along the border with Mexico, many of these one-of-a-kind discs. To date, more than 90,000 of his vintage recordings have been posted online.
“Chris amassed the largest collection of Mexican and Mexican American recorded sound in the world, and donated it to the Arhoolie Foundation,” Leopold said. Arhoolie Records was acquired by Smithsonian Folkways in 2016. Down Home Music continues to operate, and up until last November, Strachwitz was in the store talking music with his customers.
He was never married and had no children. He lived in the same house in North Berkeley, where he did many recordings, until 2018 when he moved into assisted living in San Rafael. Survivors include brother Hugh Strachwitz of Bonita (San Diego County) and sisters Frances Strachwitz of San Rafael and Rosy Schlueter of Tryon, N.C.
A public memorial is being planned for later in the year. Donations in his name may be made to the Arhoolie Foundation, 10341 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito, CA 94530.
Reach Sam Whiting: swhiting@sfchronicle.com