Musicologist’s Arhoolie label helped preserve American sound
NEW YORK — Chris Strachwitz, a producer, musicologist and oneman preservation society whose Arhoolie Records released thousands of songs by regional performers and comprised an extraordinary American archive that became known and loved worldwide, has died. He was 91.
Strachwitz, recipient in 2016 of a Grammy Trustee Award, passed away Friday from complications with congestive heart failure at an assisted living facility in the San Francisco Bay Area’s Marin County, the Arhoolie Foundation said Saturday.
Admired by Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt and many others, Strachwitz was an unlikely champion of the American vernacular — a native German born into privilege who fell deeply for his adopted country’s music and was among the most intrepid field recorders to emerge after Alan Lomax.
He founded Arhoolie in 1960 and over the following decades traveled to Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana among other states on a mission that rarely relented: taping little-known artists in their home environments, be it a dance hall, a front porch, a beer joint, a backyard.
“My stuff isn’t produced. I just catch it as it is,” he explained in the 2014 documentary “This Ain’t No Mouse Music.”
The name Arhoolie, suggested by fellow musicologist Mack McCormick, is allegedly a regional expression for field holler.
Ry Cooder would call him “El Fanatico,” the kind of true believer for whom just the rumor of a musician worth hearing would inspire him to get on a bus and ride hundreds of miles — like the time he sought out bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins in Houston. Strachwitz amassed a vast catalog of blues, Tejano, folk, jazz, gospel and Zydeco, with Grammy winners Flaco Jimenez and Clifton Chenier among those who later attracted wider followings. An Arhoolie 50-year anniversary box set featured Maria Muldaur, Taj Mahal, Savoy Family Band and Cooder, who would cite the Arhoolie release “Mississippi’s Big Joe Williams and His Nine-String Guitar” as an early inspiration.
“It just jumped out of the speaker on this little school record player,” Cooder told NPR in 2013, adding that he decided “once and for all” to become a musician. “I’m gonna do this, too. I’m gonna get good on guitar, and I’m gonna play it like that.”
Strachwitz despised most commercial music — “mouse music,” he called it — but he did have just enough success to keep Arhoolie going. In the mid-1960s, he recorded an album in his living room for no charge by Berkeley-based folk performer Joe McDonald, who in turn granted publishing rights to Arhoolie. By 1969, McDonald was leading Country Joe McDonald and the Fish and one song from the Arhoolie sessions, the anti-war anthem “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-toDie Rag,” was a highlight of the Woodstock festival and soundtrack.
Arhoolie releases were cherished by blues fans in England, including Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.