Chris Strachwitz, who searched for the roots of American music with the eagerness of a pilgrim, discovered traditional musicians with the skill 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 in San Rafael, California. He was 91.
His death, in a residential care home, was caused by congestive heart failure, his brother Hubert said.
Mr. Strachwitz (pronounced STRACK-wits) specialized in music passed down through the generations—cotton field music, orange grove music, mountain music, bayou music, barroom music, portico music—predating not only the music industry era, but even before the rise of mass culture.
Like other leading musical folklorists of the modern recording era – including Moses Asch, Alan Lomax and Harry Smith – Mr. Strachwitz share that history before they disappeared.
But the magnitude of his devotion and the idiosyncrasy of his passions defy comparison.
Mr. Strachwitz was the founder of Arhoolie Records (the name comes from a term for field screamers). In addition to recruiting his own artists, he did his own field recordings, music editing, production, liner notes, advertising and sales. In the early years of the company, he put the labels on the records and shipped them himself.
He was a lifelong bachelor who said having a family would have thwarted his career. On his travels across the country recording new music, he kept a hand-operated orange juicer and 20-pound bags of oranges for company. The targets of his quest included a lawnmower, a gravedigger and a janitor, whose musical talents were essentially unknown at the time.
He emigrated from Germany after growing up as a teenager under Nazi rule and went on to explore the widest reaches of American pluralism. He was interested not only in the standard roots repertoire of folk and blues, but also in norteño, cajun, zydeco, klezmer, Hawaiian steel guitar, Ukrainian violin, Czech polka and Irish dance music, among countless other genres.
Explaining what united his passions, Mr. Strachwitz said he liked music that was “pure,” “hardcore,” and “old-fashioned,” especially when a musician had a “spark.” His language became more colorful as he negatively defined his type of music.
“It’s not flimsy, that’s for sure,” he said in a 2014 documentary about him. The film’s title is derived from Mr. Strachwitz’s ultimate insult, referring to everything he considered commercial, artificial, and soulless: “This Ain’t No Mouse Music!”
The first Arhoolie record, released in 1960, was “Texas Sharecropper and Songster” by the blues singer Mance Lipscomb. Mr. Lipscomb’s music had never been recorded, and the new release propelled him to prominence during the folk revival of the 1960s. Mr. Strachwitz helped revive the careers of other blues singers, including Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and Big Mama Thornton.
As a record executive and record collector, he made a particularly profound historical contribution to norteño, music from the border between Texas and Mexico. The Smithsonian Institution last year called its archive of Mexican and Mexican-American music “the largest collection of commercially produced local recordings of its kind in existence,” noting that it contained many records that were “irreplaceable.”
It was the result of about 60 years of collecting (although Mr. Strachwitz never learned to speak Spanish). Norteño musicians nicknamed him El Fanático.
He may have been considered a custodian, but he also shaped the worlds he documented. That was especially true for his recordings of Cajun musicians. In 2000, rock historian Ed Ward wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Strachwitz “helped spur the culture into what is now a full-blown renaissance.”
Perhaps his most notable Louisiana discovery was singer and accordionist Clifton Chenier, who was considered the foremost exponent of the mix of rhythm and blues, soul and Cajun music known as zydeco. While visiting the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival as an older man, Mr. Chenier his frustrations with the record industry.
“They wanted you to do what they wanted you to do, and I didn’t like that,” said Mr. Chenier. “Then I met Chris.”
Mainstream musicians also saw something special in Mr. Strachwitz. In a 2010 profile of him in The Times, guitarist Ry Cooder said Arhoolie’s second release, “Tough Times,” an LP by blues musician Big Joe Williams, “set me on a life path, the one I’m still on.”
Christian Alexander Maria Strachwitz was born on July 1, 1931 in Berlin. He grew up on an estate called Gross Reichenau in what was then Lower Silesia in Germany. (It is now a village called Bogaczow in southwestern Poland.) His father, Alexander Graf Strachwitz, and his mother, Friederike (von Bredow) Strachwitz, ran a several hundred acre vegetable and grain farm. The men of the family had the royal title of count.
The family lived in a country house built in the time of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia. The Nazis appointed Chris’s father as a local game warden, and during World War II he joined the army and rose to the rank of captain, although Hubert Strachwitz said his service was limited to escorting troop transports bound for Italy. On the family’s rural ancestral property, war seemed far away for young Chris.
That changed in February 1945. The family fled when the Russians invaded the estate. Chris and two of his sisters had left by train shortly before; his father escaped by horse and buggy; Hubert, Chris’ other two sisters and his mother left on a tractor-trailer. Thanks to a wealthy relative in the United States, the family was able to reunite in Reno, Nev., by 1947.
Chris served in the United States Army from 1954 to 1956. Shortly after being honorably discharged, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He taught German for several years at a high school in the suburbs of San Jose.
In his spare time, Mr. Strachwitz collected records and developed a particular interest in Lightnin’ Hopkins, about whom he struggled to learn more. There was no public information as to whether Mr. Hopkins was still alive.
In 1959, a fellow music enthusiast told Mr. Strachwitz that he had found Mr. Hopkins in Houston. When the school year was over, Mr. Strachwitz went on a road trip.
He later recalled finding Mr. Hopkins playing in “a little beer tent,” improvising songs in a conversational style, telling a woman in the crowd to calm down, while wondering in song about the California man who had traveled all the way to him. Texas “to hear poor Lightnin’ sing.”
Mr. Strachwitz believed that no one had ever recorded such a scene live. After a tip off of one of Mr. Hopkins’ songs, he returned to Texas the following year and found Mr. Lipscomb. This time he had a recorder with him.
Meeting musicians where they lived and recording them where they liked to play, rather than in a studio, became Mr. Strachwitz’s signature style.
He found unexpected commercial success when Country Joe and the Fish performed their “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” at the Woodstock music festival in 1969. Joe McDonald, the lead singer and main songwriter of the band, had used Mr. Strachwitz’s equipment to record the song in 1965 and had given him publishing rights in return. With his share of the royalties, Mr. Strachwitz made a down payment on a building in El Cerrito, California, near Berkeley. It became home to Arhoolie and a record store he called the Down Home Music Store.
In addition to recording music, he brought attention to the artists he loved by collaborating with the filmmaker Les Blank on several music documentaries.
As the record industry declined, Mr. Strachwitz focused on a non-profit arm of Arhoolie that digitizes and exhibits his unique record collection. In 2016, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the non-profit label of the Smithsonian Institution, acquired the Arhoolie catalog.
In addition to his brother, Mr. Strachwitz is survived by three sisters, Rosy Schlueter, Barbara Steward, and Frances Strachwitz.
There was one word that Mr. Strachwitz often used to describe success in his field. When he found an old master of traditional music playing a song at a resonant time and place, he called it, like chasing butterflies, a “catch.”
