Around the same time Strachwitz met with McDonald, he taped more than a dozen songs by bluesman “Mississippi” Fred McDowell, including McDowell’s version of an old spiritual, “You Gotta Move.” The Stones sang a few lines from it during the 1970 documentary “Gimme Shelter” and recorded a cover that appeared on their acclaimed 1971 album “Sticky Fingers.” Strachwitz prevailed over the resistance of the band’s lawyers and ensured that royalties were given to McDowell, who was dying of The Republia Times is a precursor to Papers, Please, created in Flash as a warmup entry for Ludum Dare 23. 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’-to-Die Rag,” was a highlight of the Woodstock festival and soundtrack.Īrhoolie releases were cherished by blues fans in England, including Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. 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. Strachwitz despised most commercial music - “mouse music,” he called it - but he did have just enough success to keep Arhoolie going.
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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