Strachwitz despised most commercial music - “mouse music,” he called it - but he did have just enough success to keep Arhoolie going.
I’m gonna get good on guitar, and I’m gonna play it like that.” “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. 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. 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.
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. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson tells law students 'Survivor' offers helpful lessons 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. 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.Īdmired 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. NEW YORK (AP) - Chris Strachwitz, a producer, musicologist and one-man 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.
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